Smile!

Isn’t it charming when people feel the need to give you unsolicited observations about your appearance or mannerisms.  You know, as if they are pointing out something you hadn’t already recognized in yourself a thousand times before.

People love to tell me that I never smile.  Or when I do smile, they love to say, “Wow. You’re actually smiling”.  I am never quite sure how to navigate this.  I usually launch into my defence that just because I don’t walk around smiling all of the time it doesn’t mean that I am not happy. I am just not a smiley person.

I then spend the next portion of my day observing others to see if they walk around with smiles on their faces. Why isn’t everyone else subject to the same smile expectations that I am?  Then I think, maybe it isn’t that I am not smiling but that I am scowling.  I carefully study my face in the mirror and try to see what others are seeing.  It’s not so much a scowl, I don’t think. I practice turning the ends of my lips slightly up.  But thinking about having to do this all of the time is exhausting.

I suppose I don’t want people thinking I am grumpy all of the time just because I was genetically engineered to slightly frown.  Maybe their advice is useful and I should take it as an opportunity to improve myself and people’s perceptions of me.  Because I am happy damn it; well I’m happy most of the time anyway.

My friend has recently run into similar unwanted comments.  This month alone she has been told by a number of people that she has emotional baggage that she needs to deal with and that she has fifteen years of bad posture. And even though she was completely annoyed by the nerve of these people to be offering their two-cents, she has spent most of the month crying and trying to stand up straight.

I think a lot of us sometimes walk around in a bit of bubble about ourselves. We are so used to us that we don’t see what everybody else sees.  And then someone (or ten people) comes along and makes a comment that makes us stop and think. As I said, I already knew I wasn’t a smiley person but the fact that my peers are feeling the need to tell me I never smile makes me think I am a lot less smiley than I thought I was and certainly less the average person.  My close friends might not notice this about me because they are too used to me to.  At some point in our friendships, the good and the bad just all get rolled into one acceptable package.

There is a large part of me that does not care what people think of me. But there is an equally large part that does.  We care what people think because our connections to others are all we really have.  I want to look on the outside the way I feel on the inside. And on the inside I am a (mostly) happy person.  Smiling a little more often can’t be too hard, can it?  I am sure someone will tell me soon enough.