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7. Make Your Own Judgements

I've never liked the squad-mentality of friendship. The whole "if one person doesn't like her, we ALL don't like her" attitude is faulty. In spite of the loyalty we may owe our friends' judgement, it's not fair for us to let one person's judgement spoil our own.

Girls talk about each other. A lot. There's no such things as secrets sometimes, and if you've messed with one of my friends, chances are we've talked about you. A lot. It's just what we do. In the moment, we may discuss one's distrustful or disgusting nature based on a bad experience a friend has had. But most often, my interactions with some of the people we discuss have never been short of positive.

When our trusted friends narrate the encounters they have with people, some details can accidentally get exaggerated. Perhaps they misread the facial cues and tones they relay for us to form a judgement on the people they speak of. On numerous occasions, I've heard my friends characterize people to be ruthless, selfish, patronizing, snarky, snobbish, or downright diabolical only for me to actually meet them in person and discover not an ounce of such judgement was fitting. I don't mean to say my friends may have lied about their judgement- everyone perceives things differently. My only point is that it's not fair to judge a person based on someone else's perception. We have to make judgement of character by ourselves.

Even if a trusted friend is correct about his or her judgement of someone, I'd rather experience it by myself than taking heed. At times, wanting to experience things for yourself can be wasteful, maybe even hurtful. However, there's too much potential in this world for us to step back because of someone else's tensions. As they say, "one man's trash is another man's treasure". Like so, what one judges as negative could very well be what you see as a positive.

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