Happy & Healthy

SMILE… FOR ONCE NOT

Do you know that moment when you take a photo with everyone? You stand next to each other and the person taking the photo stands in front of you with an iPhone at the ready. And then something weird always happens. Everyone holds their breath and... smiles (unless your name is Victoria Beckham, of course). Sometimes it takes quite a while before the photographer presses the liberating button and you stand there frozen, smiling until you almost get cramps in your jaws. Even though there was nothing to laugh about at all and you’re even in the photo with people you don’t even like. The moment the photo is taken, you also hear everyone breathe a sigh of relief. Great, we don’t have to pretend anymore.

I study haptherapy, in case I hadn’t mentioned that yet, and one of the first things I was confronted with was my own compulsive smile. We did an exercise where you had to walk around each other. Nothing more. And then occasionally you looked at each other. I caught myself feeling like I had to smile at everyone continuously. Like: ‘Hello, here I am, do you like me?’ I suddenly became aware of how incredibly much energy this cost me all the time. Yes, most people do like me too, because I have a really nice smile of course and I work very hard to make the contact as pleasant and fun as possible, but is it always worth that investment on my part? Can I also try a little less hard and first see what the other person brings to the table? Maybe that other person doesn’t want contact at all and I’m just exhausting myself for nothing. Or maybe I’m compulsively smiling at people who don’t deserve it at all.

‘Hello, here I am, do you like me?’

Or this: someone tells you a really sad story. Mother is very sick, the dog is dead, a relationship just ended or lost a job and all the while that person keeps smiling compulsively. You can see that the smile isn’t real. That it’s just a pair of lips pulled apart with a row of teeth in between, that the eyes are trying to shine, but it’s not coming together. Why do we find that smile so necessary? Because everyone really understands that you don’t feel good when you’re in a bad situation. Why do we find it so hard to just show how we feel? Namely: sad. Or angry. Or anxious. Or however you want to put it.

As a recovering notorious smiler, I know that I always thought you had to try to make the best of everything. And that the smile was part of that. I thought you shouldn’t drown in your own misery, let alone bother other people with it. You had to be strong. Po-si-tive thinking. Being sad was for the weak. And so I just kept going, told everyone that I was doing great, tried to convince myself that I was doing great, but deep down there was a very different story going on.

With a smile, you really don’t fool anyone. And especially not yourself. The only thing a smile does is give you a facade of control. Like: I feel really terrible, but I’m still smiling. But know that you’re not getting anywhere with that. First of all, emotions only become unbearable when you push them away. Secondly, you only become further removed from yourself and from others, especially if you’re faking it all day long. You become numb to your own feelings. And your friends can’t connect with you this way. Because they’re watching a kind of play the whole time. If you want someone to support you, it helps if you don’t put up a wall around you in the form of an iron smile.

“Po-si-tive thinking.”

So I have very liberating news for you: you don’t have to smile if you don’t really feel like smiling. I challenge you to try it for a day. Be aware of when you smile and when you don’t. And when it’s real and when it’s not. You’ll be surprised. My teacher also gave me this tip: ‘Try looking at people as if you’re looking at a painting and then see what your natural reaction is. That painting doesn’t ask anything back from you either. Sometimes a painting doesn’t evoke anything in you, sometimes you find it downright ugly and sometimes it brings a smile to your face.’

And then for myself: I had to select photos for www.hotelhartzeer.nl, my super fun project with Susan Smit about heartbreak and I realized that I had only chosen smiling photos, where I could see in some of the photos that the smile wasn’t entirely authentic. But still, I found myself prettier, smiling. Now it seems that Victoria finds herself prettier without a smile and that’s why she adopts such an iron pose. Maybe she’s laughing her head off under that mask and that’s quite a funny idea.