Why I am not smiling.
/
"Smile."
smile!!!
You should smile more often.
Please my loves, please don't tell me to smile.
I know that it somehow feels like you are helping me to be more happy but I am a freaking happy fucking person. I really am.
Hang out with me for 10 minutes and I will laugh and smile and we will have a really good time. Well, if I like you. Which I usually do.
I am not one of those people born with a smile on their face. I clench my brow and my jaw, and my pelvis if we are being that open. I clench. I am tight.
I'm learning to release but it is my process. I have a lot of stuff to process and I am not going to rush through it because you decide to tell me to smile on an instagram photo or on FB.
I smile when I see you. I smile when you are next to me. I smile when I smile.
When you tell me (or another highly sensitive person, or your kid or your wife or partner) to smile when they are deep in thought it may hurt their soul in ways you never intend.
Most people don't like to be told what to do. Me and smiling, no exception. And I love you. And I will smile over wine and talking about tattoos and cute boys and that blog post that turned us on to life even more. But I won't smile because you instruct me to.
Neither will they.
That picture that you told me I should be smiling in, well, actually I thought I looked pretty fucking sexy. Yeah, that is my sexy face. I like being and feeling sexy. I'm going to keep doing that.
When I am alone, as I am in most of my instagram self portraits (which by the way have changed the way that I feel about myself in huge luscious, positive ways), I don't have anyone to smile at. I make my sexy face, or my 'i am exhausted' face or my 'this is just me right now' face.
But again, if you were here I would be smiling. Unless you were being mean to me. Then I probably wouldn't be. Although, you never know.
If I smile for that iphone in my right hand it is false. I'm weird like that, I know, but I like smiling at you. I like smiling at you when I see you in the courtyard of my favorite hotel and we've just met for the first time.
I smile when my little man Lucas says crazy shit that only I can understand. And really, I don't understand him, I just laugh my ass off.
This has been my reality since High School. I remember sitting in the library with my cool late 80's reading glasses and some guy who was pretty cute but I really wasn't into sitting next to me and telling me I should smile.
Um, I don't smile when I'm reading!!! Seriously people, do you smile when you are reading when it isn't funny?
Yes, my brow creases. I have an astigmatism. Yes, I have lines inbetween my brows but have you seen my laugh lines? I have and seriously they have been making me feel old for some time now.
But I'm not going to stop smiling. Except when you tell me to. Because when you tell me to my feelings get hurt. And hurt feelings suck.
I smile a hell of a lot. And I'm stressed and OCD and full of anxiety a hell of a lot.
This my loves is me. ( I swear a lot too, much to my daughter's dismay. Think it came from going to college in NH. They love their swearing there.)
Truly, I can handle the comments on the photos telling me to smile. But maybe your 13 year old can't. Maybe she is so full of puberty angst that someone telling her to smile makes her feel that she is all wrong. And she isn't. She probably smiles and laughs when she is with her friends, just not maybe at you right now. Or in the library in her early 2000's glasses.
When you say, "I love when you smile" because I am smiling at you, that is pretty awesome. Turns me onto life even more.
When you say, "You have a beautiful smile" I kinda wanna be friends with you forever.
Just please, don't tell me to smile. Please see me for who I am. In each moment.
If you are going through your day and you meet someone sans smile, make it your mission to help them find their smile. Not because you tell them to but because you are awesome enough to bring it out in them. Then accept them for who they are now. We all get to choose. Remember people get diagnosed with cancer and lose fortunes and have their heart broken daily.
Love them up.
Don't tell them how to be. That hurts spirits.
That picture up there? Oh, that is my sexy face.