Hard to Impress

This writing might seem a bit negative or apathetic, and to be honest, I don’t like to show this part of me. People look at my bright eyes and don’t notice sometimes that it is just a performance. And it kills me when they don’t notice, because if I were actually impressed, I would have stayed, or given an honest opinion.

But I can’t blame them, That makes me two sided, a hypocrite. But that is never my intention. My intention is to get through the day without making someone feel the hurt of my honest words. A cheerful face, a compliment here and there, that’s all I need to survive the day. Yes, your project is great. Yes, you’re clearly a hard worker. But there are things I’ve never said out loud.

Don’t take the project to me hoping to impress me with your personality. I don’t care about your achievements. Those medals, that ability to write differential equations, they’re genuinely good, and I respect the discipline it took to earn them. But they don’t impress me. I came from a background where I’ve seen whole rooms full of brilliant, nerds, self driven people, so finding more of them doesn’t really add anything new to my world. That doesn’t make your skills worth less, or mean an abundance of people like you makes you cheaper, no. You should be proud. But please don’t assume I’ll be wowed by it. I wish I could be. I genuinely wish I were easier to impress.

I had never looked at this part of myself and tried to give it words, until I had a call with my friend Mazen from the School of Math, batch of 2021. Mazen and I are kind of similar. And he said it plainly: that I’m really hard to impress. When he said that, I felt touched. I had never used that phrase in my life. Although I know it is kind of being used by almost everyone, But it named something I’d been carrying since I was a kid. something I have always felt.

Autism

Recently, my friend Awab took an autism spectrum test. He landed right in the middle, not fully neurotypical, which we refer to as normies, not clinically autistic, just somewhere in between. And when the results came back, they explained his entire life: why he found it hard to get along with normies, and also why people on the more severe end of the spectrum felt foreign to him too. Both groups were extremes. Awab was neither. So he’d spent his life as this unusual in between, never fully belonging to either side.

I mention this because I think I have something similar, not on the autism spectrum necessarily, but in terms of the kind of people I'm drawn to. I can't seem to find a category for [who I like](https://a7med7x7.github.io/posts/i-dont-have-a-type/). I don't like nerds, not that I hate them, but they genuinely don't impress me, and I can't remember a time when they did. at all, at least not know while writing and reflecting. The same goes for people who are just casually living, the ones whose inner life seems less complicated, less rough terrain. people who have a certain kind of madness in them. A bipolar. Someone with OCD. Those mad geniuses who have a personality disorder. I can't seem to find a word to tag the people I'm naturally drawn to yet. But that's not what I'm into writing.

For now, what I want to sit with is what Mazen named. Being hard to impress is a heavy thing to carry. You walk through life not being genuinely lit up by other people. Am I the problem? Is it the people? I don’t spend a lot of time on that question. What I notice is just the sensation, this internal flatness when someone tries to impress me, and I can’t force my way out of it. I can’t force myself to like someone, It’s strange to even think about. to think about faking my interest, So I never did.

Maybe it’s because I feel like I’ve already seen every type. as if I have lived a hundred years before. Maybe I’m too absorbed in my own life to let someone else’s story land. But it’s not resentment. I genuinely respect people. I think everyone has something real inside them, struggles, contradictions, a story that made them who they are. Everyone who moves through the world decently deserves to be happy. But respect is not the same as being impressed. And what I hate most is when someone performs for me, tries to pull something out of me that I don’t have to give. You can’t force me to be moved. And I’ve learned, only recently, that this goes both ways: I’ve never really wanted to impress anyone either. It never occurred to me that someone might be trying to do to me what I couldn’t imagine wanting to do to them.

What impresses me, if anything does, isn’t a growth mindset, or blind ambition or faith, or beauty, or a clean academic record. It’s not your history. I don’t have a clean list yet. But I know it’s a combination of things I haven’t fully mapped. And maybe the fact that I can’t map it is exactly the point.