If you were formerly a nice person off the bat, it was like extending everyone you met a nice, large line of credit.
After enough bad experiences and losses, you give smaller and smaller lines of credit.
Now, granted, it depends a lot on how you meet them and their references and everything else. I'm sure that there are students and even professors who you remember as being kind and gracious.
But those are few and far between and so you simply start off guarded and prepared to dole out appropriate brusqueness. Because you learned that being nice off the bat is perceived as being easy to take advantage of, and that just doesn't work.
You need to go to more environments where you feel less guarded from the get-go, and then you'll start to recover the fragments of your faith in humanity. =)
no subject
Date: 2004-07-12 10:02 pm (UTC)If you were formerly a nice person off the bat, it was like extending everyone you met a nice, large line of credit.
After enough bad experiences and losses, you give smaller and smaller lines of credit.
Now, granted, it depends a lot on how you meet them and their references and everything else. I'm sure that there are students and even professors who you remember as being kind and gracious.
But those are few and far between and so you simply start off guarded and prepared to dole out appropriate brusqueness. Because you learned that being nice off the bat is perceived as being easy to take advantage of, and that just doesn't work.
You need to go to more environments where you feel less guarded from the get-go, and then you'll start to recover the fragments of your faith in humanity. =)