The Words We Throw Away
I was twenty-three years old, exhausted, and almost certainly wearing the same hoodie I had slept in. It was a Tuesday morning in late November, the kind of cold that makes everything feel a little more hopeless than it actually is. I had just left a job interview I was convinced I had bombed, and I was walking to my car in a strip mall parking lot outside a discount office supply store, mentally composing the rejection email I assumed was already being drafted somewhere in a fluorescent-lit HR office.
That is when a woman, probably in her late sixties, caught my eye. She was loading grocery bags into the trunk of a beige sedan. She looked up, smiled, and said something I was not prepared for.
“You have the most naturally kind face I have ever seen. Whoever is lucky enough to know you must feel very safe.”
I blinked. I think I said thank you. I probably mumbled it, actually. And then I got in my car, drove home, and spent the next several hours convincing myself she had either mistaken me for someone else or was simply one of those relentlessly cheerful people who said things like that to everyone.
I dismissed it almost immediately. And yet here I am, two decades later, still thinking about it.
Why Do We Reject the Good Things People Say About Us?
There is a strange and somewhat painful irony in the way human beings process compliments. Research in social psychology has shown that we are significantly more likely to remember criticism than praise, a phenomenon tied to what is called negativity bias. Our brains evolved to prioritize threats, and somewhere along the way, that wiring made it easier to hold onto the harsh things and let the tender ones slip through our fingers.
But I do not think that is the whole story. I think there is something more specific happening when a compliment comes from a stranger, someone with no social obligation to be kind to us, no relationship to protect, no reason to flatter. Those are actually the compliments that should carry the most weight. And yet they are often the ones we are most suspicious of.
We tell ourselves:
- She was just being polite.
- He says that to everyone.
- They do not actually know me, so how could they possibly mean it?
- If people who do know me do not say things like that, why would a stranger?
That last one is the cruelest thought of all. And it is the one I leaned on hardest at twenty-three.
What She Saw That I Could Not
Here is the thing about being seen by a stranger: they have no context for who you are supposed to be. They are not filtering their perception through years of knowing your flaws, your failures, your embarrassing moments at the family Christmas dinner. They are simply looking at you, clearly and without history, and responding to what is actually there.
That woman in the parking lot had no idea I had just tanked a job interview. She did not know I was behind on rent, that I had been in a relationship that had recently ended badly, or that I spent most of my evenings that autumn eating cereal for dinner and watching television until I fell asleep on the couch. She just saw a tired young woman walking to her car and noticed something she thought was worth saying out loud.
And what she said was not about my appearance. It was not a compliment about my hair or my coat. She said I had a kind face. That I made people feel safe. She was telling me something about my character, about the invisible thing I was putting into the world without even knowing it.
Twenty-three-year-old me could not hold that. But forty-three-year-old me is still unwrapping it.
The Compliments That Outlast the Ones We Wanted
We spend so much of our lives chasing specific forms of validation. We want the promotion to prove we are capable. We want a particular person to say they love us, to prove we are lovable. We want our work praised by someone whose opinion we have decided matters.
And sometimes those things come. But it is rarely those moments that stay with us the longest.
Think back over your own life. Which compliments do you still carry? I would be willing to guess that at least one of them came from someone unexpected. A teacher who mentioned something in passing. A colleague who sent a brief, offhand email. A child who said something devastatingly honest and pure. A stranger in a parking lot.
These moments lodge themselves somewhere deep because they were not transactional. Nobody was getting anything from saying them. They were just true, and someone chose to say them anyway.
What I Wish I Had Done Differently
I wish I had stopped walking. I wish I had turned back and actually looked at that woman. I wish I had said, genuinely and without the nervous reflex to deflect, “Thank you. That means more than you know.”
Because it did. It just took me twenty years to realize it.
I also wish I had let it in at the time. Not because I needed the ego boost, but because I think I needed the reminder that I was visible. That I was moving through the world leaving some kind of impression, and that the impression was not the disaster I feared it was.
At twenty-three, I was deeply convinced that I was, in some fundamental way, too much and not enough at the same time. Too sensitive, not confident enough. Too earnest, not polished enough. That woman, who owed me nothing, looked at me for three seconds and saw something worth naming.
A Small Challenge Worth Taking
There is a quiet kind of courage in saying something kind to a stranger. Not a hollow pleasantry, not a reflexive “love your shoes,” but something genuine. Something you actually notice. Something true.
Most of us think these things and say nothing. We assume it would be weird, or that the other person would be uncomfortable, or that it does not really matter because we will never see them again anyway.
But what if it does matter? What if the thing you notice and choose to say out loud becomes the thing someone carries for twenty years? What if it reaches them on a Tuesday in November when everything feels a little more hopeless than it should?
You will probably never know. That is the beautiful and slightly heartbreaking part. The woman in the parking lot almost certainly does not remember me. She went home, unpacked her groceries, and got on with her life. She has no idea that what she said in thirty seconds is something I have returned to again and again, particularly in moments when I needed to remember that I was, in fact, a person worth knowing.
The Lesson I Keep Learning
I am better now at receiving kindness than I was at twenty-three. I have done enough work on myself to understand that deflecting a compliment is not modesty, it is a small act of self-erasure. When someone offers you something true and good, and you wave it away, you are not being humble. You are disagreeing with them. You are saying, quietly, no, you are wrong about me.
Receiving a compliment gracefully is an act of respect, both for the person offering it and for yourself. It does not mean you are arrogant. It means you are willing to be seen.
I think about that woman sometimes and hope her life has been full of people who told her what she was worth. I hope someone stopped in a parking lot and gave her thirty seconds of honest, unexpected kindness. I hope she let it in.
And if you are reading this and there is a compliment you dismissed, a moment when someone saw something in you and you waved it off, consider going back to it. Not to inflate yourself, but to understand yourself. To ask: what if they were right? What if you really are that thing they noticed?
What if you always have been, and you just needed someone with no reason to lie to you to finally say it out loud?