It turns out that everything we think people hate about us is wrong. Psychologists have a term for this: projection. We project our own feelings and expectations on other people and make predictions and decisions based on that. For big things, like whether the puma down the pathway would like to eat us, this usually works out for the best.
It sort of fails for other things, like whether our significant other will be stupid and weird about that tattoo we got while drunk on Spring Break, or our habit of making a trumpet noise every time someone says “irrelevant”, or the fact that we’re a five-hundred-year-old fairy.
The trick is to recognize when you’re doing it and stop it. I’ve found that most people are more than happy to tell me what they really think if I give them the chance. It actually works out a lot better than it does for me to tell them.
