Phrases That Have Affected Me the Most

This is a list of some of the things various people have said to me that has affected me the most, either positively or negatively, and that have had lasting effects on my personality.

• "I see two versions of you, the one you're afraid to show people, and the one you put up to avoid getting hurt. I like the first one better." Said by a roommate whom I had had a fling with. I know I still do this. I don't know why, but surely it has to do with school and having classmates who would examine every aspect of one's personality looking for every possible exploitable weakness.
  
  
• "You think girls who wear makeup are stupid." Said by my sister. Of course I don't actually think this, but I think maybe I believe that someone who is so conscious of their own looks as to spend time and effort making themselves look pretty must surely pay more attention to how I look, and (in my mind) must weigh my unattractiveness more heavily than someone who puts less energy into their own appearance.
  
  
• "I've never heard you say you didn't like someone after you meet them. I think you just like people for being people" ... "But you're afraid to say hello because you think they won't like you." I still have this tendency, to enjoy meeting people but to be scared to death of doing it. It might have something to do with not being able to interpret body language, and with being primarily concerned with staying out of people's way in social situations rather than mixing and interacting the way most people can. I'm sort of slowly learning a way to combat this and it mostly worked when I was out last Friday. I've made it sufficiently known to people that I probably won't recognize them in a dark room or from any distance away. And when I got to the show on Friday I just stood in a fairly prominent area, made sure to not shy away from people if I saw them coming, and just sort of smiled and made it come across that I was enjoying myself. At other times very similar situations of being alone in a crowd have left me short of breath and needing desperately to get outside, so if I can keep up this other approach I should be much better off.
  
  
• "Something doesn't have to be important or interesting for it to be worth doing to you." I forget who said this exactly but it was in response to my dismissing the idea of doing something because I knew I wouldn't end up being particularly notably good at it. I don't think I'm particularly competetive but I don't like displaying an obvious weakness. I think this was a gym teacher who was trying to get me to actually try and go after the ball during soccer games instead of just, again, keeping out of people's way. I ended up being actually almost decent at it, and people didn't begrudge my presence on the field like I thought they would.

These have at times been lessons quickly lost, but maybe I'll be able to remind myself a little more easily now that I've written them down.