Vox Meditantis

What’s the first impression you want to give people?

Sunday, 16th November 2025

The harbour spent the morning undecided about sunshine, the way some people hover in a doorway before committing to a room. Rain flirted with the windows, then withdrew; gulls argued half-heartedly over nothing in particular; the Delaware had the sullen sheen of pewter that has agreed to be beautiful only on its own terms. On my desk, beneath the paperweight that used to be a sugar bowl, todays prompt waited with unnerving cheerfulness: What’s the first impression you want to give people?

The question sounds like something from a magazine quiz, the sort that promises to decode your personality in ten multiple-choice answers and a diagram involving spirit animals. But it landed, this morning, more like a clinical note I had forgotten to write about myself.

A few weeks ago, a new patient sat in the waiting room, coat still on, hands locked round the shell from the bowl by the window. She wasn’t looking at her phone, which is unusual for her generation; she was staring at the door to my consulting room as if it were the entrance to an exam she hadn’t revised for. When I came out to greet her, she laughed – a little too quickly – and said, “I wasn’t sure if I was meant to knock or if you’d come to rescue me.”

That sentence, more than any personality inventory, is a practical definition of first impression. Who do you seem to be – the examiner, the rescuer, the witness, the bored functionary – before anyone has enough data to know better? In that moment, what I wanted her to feel was not admiration, or awe, or the urge to perform. I wanted her nervous system to conclude, without fanfare, “This is probably safe.”

For most of my adult life, however, the impression I’ve unconsciously tried to give has been a close cousin to safe and not always in a healthy way: impeccably competent. This is hardly surprising when one’s father drove buses and then ran municipal transport with the sort of reliability that could be used to set clocks. Joseph Bennett introduced himself to the world, day after day, as a man whose presence meant the route would run, the doors would open, and everyone would get home without drama.

My mother, Elizabeth, approached first impressions from a different angle entirely. On the Reno casino floor, charm was not optional; it was survival. Her opening move with strangers was sparkle – laughter that arrived half a beat earlier than anyone else’s, an anecdote ready for deployment, a teasing remark that made people feel seen without quite letting them see her. Between them, my parents bequeathed me two equally persuasive scripts: be reliably useful or be dazzlingly likeable. Neither left much room for simply being present.

So, for decades, my own first impression has been a negotiated truce between their styles. Calm, contained, professionally warm – Dr Bennett, who always knows what time it is and never needs rescuing. The Victorian rooms colluded beautifully: high windows, harbour view, chairs that declare their ethics before I open my mouth. People step in and feel, at least I hope they do, that someone has thought about where the tissues are and how the light falls on their face when they cry.

What they don’t see, at first, is the quieter impression I have been far more reluctant to give: Catherine, who sometimes loses track of her own story while tending everyone else’s; who is still learning that rest isn’t a moral failure; who, at fifty-eight, is experimenting with watercolours and late-life companionship in a town that has grown used to her as a piece of its furniture. First impressions have been my preferred hiding place.

The prompt on my desk today is really asking whether I want to keep using them that way.

On the harbour walk this morning, Father Walsh suggested – without quite meaning to – that first impressions are just secular liturgy. He said it while adjusting his scarf against a wind that had ambitions beyond November: People notice the first ten seconds and the last ten seconds and assume the rest in between is more of the same. He’s right, irritatingly. A bus driver who is late once is silently judged by that morning for the rest of the year. A change girl who frowns on a Friday night must work twice as hard on Saturday to convince the high-rollers the tables are still lucky. A psychiatrist whose first impression is briskly distant will find it takes months to persuade a traumatised patient that warmth is not a trap.

When I think about the first impression I want to give now, it is less a portrait of me and more a weather report for the other persons nervous system. I want them to feel that urgency can stand down a little. That no performance is required. That they have walked into a room organised around their dignity, not my ego.

This is not how I would have answered the question at thirty-five, when my private fantasy was that people would leave my office impressed. Impressed by my formulations, perhaps, or my stamina, or the way I seemed unruffled by stories that kept them awake at three in the morning. At thirty-five, the first impression I wanted to give was of someone who never tripped over her own emotions. At fifty-eight, that sounds less like authority and more like a plausible description of a moderately well-designed robot.

The past few weeks have conspired to put pressure on this. Sitting at the Historical Society table with Maggie’s careful stacks of paper, being asked to decide whether my mother’s letters should join the town archives, I realised how much of Elizabeth’s life has been distilled by other people’s first impressions. Casino girl, then bus driver’s wife, then community stalwart in New Corinth. Few people here knew the woman who wrote, in a margin, “Kept aside for spring, if spring will have me.” That line is not about charm. It’s about an interior life that refused to be entirely flattened into other people’s categories.

Then there is the watercolour class, where my first impression is blessedly irrelevant because everyone is too busy fighting their own skies. There, I am simply the woman in the second row whose horizons are consistently crooked and whose trees look faintly apologetic. My competency is of no use to me at all. The instructor, sleeves rolled, meets us each week with the same unhurried greeting: I’m glad you’re here. It’s the first impression I remember long after the paper has buckled and dried.

And David – harbour concert, Bartók, washing up with almost absurd care – has developed a quiet habit of refusing to collude with my polished entrance. After one performance, he said, entirely without malice, “You know you don’t have to arrive fully assembled.” We were standing in the church doorway, caught between the echo of strings and the chill of the street. My instinctive reply was to laugh it off; my nervous system, however, filed the remark under inconvenient truths.

So: what first impression do I want to give people now, in this city that knows too much of my professional biography and not nearly enough of my ordinary humanity?

I think I’d like to offer three small things.

First, unhurried attention. Not the intense, interrogative stare that makes one feel like a case study, but the sort of gaze my father gave his passengers in the mirror – checking, without intruding, that everyone was still upright. In practice, this looks like leaving a sliver of silence before I speak, letting the other persons words land fully before I reach for mine. I hope the first impression is She is actually listening, not waiting to talk.

Second, tolerable imperfection. An office where the chairs are thoughtfully chosen but the books are not always in obedient rows; a face that occasionally forgets its professional composure and betrays real feeling. I spent years believing that tidiness would reassure people. Lately, I’ve watched patients relax visibly when they notice the slightly crooked frame by the window or the watercolour I dared to hang despite its sulky trees. I’d like their first impression to be If the room is allowed to be a bit human, perhaps I am too.

Third, ordinary welcome. Not the dazzling warmth of my mother’s casino persona, nor the politely distant courtesy of too many consulting rooms, but something closer to what Elena offers over fennel and lemons, or Marcus over coffee when he simply slides the cup across and nods. A first impression that says, in so many small gestures, “You don’t have to audition for your place here.”

Of course, one doesn’t get to dictate how one is received. Some people will always experience me first as authority, others as potential disappointment, others as background furniture in New Corinth’s long-running play. I’m aware that a woman of my age and profession carries all sorts of projections before she has uttered a word. But within that constraint there is still a choice about which parts of myself I allow to be visible in those opening seconds.

For years, I have front-loaded the role: Dr Bennett, competent, steady, a reliable piece of civic infrastructure. It has served the town well enough. It has not, if I’m honest, served me – or the people who care about me – as fully as it might. The first impression I’d like to risk more often now includes at least a hint of the rest: Catherine, who reads novels about late-life love with embarrassing attentiveness; who has, to her own quiet surprise, already booked that room overlooking the Saint Lawrence; who is learning, slowly, that saying I don’t know yet is not a dereliction of duty.

This afternoon, as the light thinned, I moved the blue chair two inches closer to the window, testing how the November sun falls at four. The effect was small but noticeable: whoever sits there tomorrow will have a fraction more light on their hands and a clearer view of the harbour doing its patient arithmetic with the tide. It struck me that first impressions are made of precisely these sorts of adjustments – a chair moved, a sentence softened, a willingness to meet someone at the door without all one’s armour buckled.

If, tomorrow, a new patient stands in the doorway and hesitates – unsure whether to knock or wait for rescue – I hope what reaches them first is not my curriculum vitae, nor my capacity to endure their story without flinching. I hope, instead, they register something quieter and more radical: that the person coming towards them is fully here, neither on a pedestal nor behind glass; that this room is interested in who they are, not how they appear; that ordinariness is not a failing but the ground on which everything worth healing will stand.

And if, by some administrative accident, the question was turned back on me in that moment – “What’s the first impression you want to give?” –  I’d like to be able to answer, truthfully, just this: Someone who is willing to be a person in the room with you, not only a role. The rest, as the harbour keeps demonstrating, can be worked out in tides.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.