I Don’t Want to Practice Smiling

There is a photograph of me from the fall of 2008, standing inside Dorton Arena in Raleigh before a Barack Obama campaign speech.

I was fourteen years old.

I am smiling.

Not the little closed-mouth expression people produce when somebody points a camera at them. Not the strained approximation of happiness that appears when the photographer says, Come on, smile.

I mean actually smiling.

My whole face appears to agree about what it is doing.

I have seen the picture enough times that it has acquired a slightly archaeological quality for me. There is evidence here of an ability I once possessed effortlessly.

Somewhere along the way, smiling became difficult.

If I deliberately try to smile now, the result is usually terrible. One side of my mouth seems to receive different instructions from the other. My eyes do something unrelated. The muscles of my face assemble themselves into an expression that looks less like happiness than an actor attempting to portray happiness after being given insufficient rehearsal time.

It looks fake because it is fake.

This is strange mainly because I do not consider myself an especially unhappy person.

There are plenty of days when I feel good.

I get interested in things. I become absorbed in projects. I enjoy music, ideas, exercise, conversations, walks, discoveries, small accomplishments. I can feel peaceful. I can feel hopeful. I can feel deeply satisfied by something without any particular urge appearing in my face to advertise the fact.

And so I have gradually stopped treating the absence of a smile as evidence that something is wrong.

Maybe my face is simply telling the truth.

The smiling adult

There is a peculiar expectation placed on adults to look happy.

We smile when photographs are taken.

We smile when we meet strangers.

We smile in professional settings to indicate friendliness.

People working in service jobs are sometimes expected to maintain pleasant facial expressions for hours at a time, regardless of what they happen to be thinking or feeling.

Even outside of work, smiling can function almost like punctuation. It tells other people that a sentence was friendly. That a silence is not hostile. That everything is fine.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Social life depends on conventions, and sometimes a smile is simply a form of courtesy.

But there is another idea that occasionally attaches itself to smiling: that if you do it often enough, perhaps the feeling will follow.

Fake it until you make it.

Maybe there is something to that.

Behavior can influence emotion. Posture can affect confidence. Rituals can change moods. Human beings are not neatly divided into an internal self and an external body, with traffic moving only in one direction.

But even if deliberately smiling could make me feel happier, I am not especially interested in practicing it.

Happiness is not quite what I am missing.

What I am missing is something closer to unburdenedness.

The background process

One of the discoveries of adulthood is that survival becomes a recurring administrative task.

You need income.

Then you need income again next month.

Housing depends on it. Food depends on it. Medical care depends on it. Electricity depends on it. Your ability to recover from some future disaster depends on the money you have accumulated before the disaster arrives.

This is particularly vivid in the United States, where many of the things a person requires in order to remain alive and functional are tied, directly or indirectly, to employment.

You can be perfectly comfortable on a Tuesday afternoon and still understand that the comfort is conditional.

Keep working.

Keep earning.

Do not fall too far.

There is a background process running.

Most of the time it does not dominate consciousness. You can cook dinner. Read a book. Walk through a park. Laugh at something stupid on the internet. Make plans for the future.

But the process remains running somewhere underneath.

The strange thing about a burden is that you do not have to be actively suffering under it every second for your body to know that you are carrying it.

Perhaps that is part of what changed between the boy in Dorton Arena and the adult looking at his photograph.

At fourteen, the machinery responsible for keeping my life intact mostly existed somewhere outside my field of vision.

Adults handled the mortgage.

Adults handled health insurance.

Adults made sure there was food.

Adults understood what happened if money stopped arriving.

There were certainly other problems at fourteen. Childhood is not automatically easy, and adulthood is not automatically miserable.

But there was a kind of structural lightness that is difficult to reproduce once you understand exactly how much of your life has to be continuously maintained.

This is not about success

For a long time, I might have described the thing I was moving toward as success.

That is not quite right.

Success is too easy to quantify.

More money. A better job. A successful project. Some impressive accomplishment.

Those things can help, but they are not the actual destination.

The destination is a life that no longer feels permanently braced against its own possible collapse.

Enough financial margin that a mistake is just a mistake.

Enough independence that losing one source of income does not threaten everything else.

Enough control over my time that survival and living no longer feel like competing activities.

Enough room to make music, build things, learn things, love people, wander around outside, and occasionally do absolutely nothing without some invisible meter continuing to run.

That is the future I imagine when I think about eventually smiling easily again.

Not triumph.

Relief.

Not a photograph of somebody standing on top of a mountain with his fists in the air.

More likely a completely ordinary afternoon when the machinery has finally become quiet enough that nobody is thinking about machinery.

A face is allowed to be serious

There is also something I have come to appreciate about a neutral face.

It does not necessarily mean sadness.

It can mean concentration.

It can mean calm.

It can mean that nothing currently happening requires commentary from the facial muscles.

Some people smile easily and frequently. That may simply be how their emotions travel through their bodies.

Mine apparently do not.

There is no particular virtue in either configuration.

The mistake would be treating one outward expression as the mandatory proof of an acceptable inner life.

I would rather let my face be serious when I feel serious.

If something makes me laugh, I will laugh.

If something makes me smile, I will smile.

But I do not want to arrange my face into the expression of a person who is delighted merely because delight photographs well.

There is information in the absence too.

The smile I don't want to learn

When I look at the photograph from 2008, I do not think my task is to become that fourteen-year-old again.

That person did not yet know many of the things I know now.

I would not trade places with him.

And perhaps whatever smiling looks like later in life will not resemble his smile anyway.

Maybe adult joy is quieter.

Maybe it arrives less often but carries more weight.

Maybe a face changes along with the person wearing it.

What I do know is that I do not want to rehearse the expression.

I do not want to stand in front of a mirror and teach the muscles where they are supposed to go.

I do not want to become better at producing the photograph.

I want to keep changing the conditions behind it.

Build more security.

Build more freedom.

Make more room.

Create a life that requires less vigilance.

And then perhaps one day something entirely unremarkable will happen.

I will be talking to somebody I love, or walking somewhere beautiful, or finishing a piece of work, or sitting outside with nothing particularly urgent waiting for me.

And without deciding to do it, without checking whether it looks natural, without giving my face any instructions at all, I will notice that it has remembered.

That is the smile I want.

Not the one I practiced.

The one I no longer had to.