Self-esteem issues

So a friend of mine told me that her friend met me once at some assessment centre and apparently I left a strong impression. He was telling her something along the lines of how he thought I'd definitely get the job, from how I carried myself and what not.

I had zero recollection of meeting him. At all.

I asked for a name and pictures. I was pretty certain that he wasn't in my group (the 8 of us were split into 2 groups) and hence concluded that I would have only met him for a brief period of 5 minutes. I only remember being 20 minutes late for the assessment centre (thanks to public transport) and met with members of the other group for a brief moment. I just sat my ass down and started asking where everyone else was from.

I immediately thought he just made everything up, but it didn't make sense because no one does that and my friend was pretty close with him. I couldn't make any sense out of it.

Today, another friend of mine (which is also a friend of my aforementioned friend, which happened to be there as well) said she had this mutual friend who would always tell her how he and I were classmates. I was a little surprised that he would bring that up because we were only close back when I was 7, 8 and 9. We pretty much lost contact after.

The aforementioned friend then commented on how people always wanted to be associated with me but I seem as if I couldn't be bothered.

It's funny, because it's really flattering, but it's a result of low self-esteem. It would be a nightmare to me if I hyped up my association with someone only to find out that the other person doesn't feel the same, like calling someone a best friend when the other person doesn't reciprocate. This then manifested itself into a defense mechanism to prevent myself from putting so much value in a particular relationship, unless the other person very overtly does the same.

Started thinking about it and suddenly other occurrences start to pop up in my head. I remember chatting with the guy that sat next to me during my graduation ceremony as if we were friends for some time, when in reality we really just talked a little back in Year 1. There was also this dude from Hong Kong that I was talking to when we were collecting our graduation robes. He remembered that I could understand Cantonese because I watched a lot of Hong Kong drama series, which I told him during the only conversation we had about 2-3 years ago.

I'm not sure what exactly to make out of this. I guess I'll just remind myself that I'm capable of leaving an impression.