In search of a natural smile

If a smile is a reflection of one’s mood, how does one cope with social interaction when feeling down and depressed – when the last thing you want to do is smile? Ahh…there lies the problem. I figured if I could find a way around that, I would be well on my way towards mingling with others.

Now, I knew that I couldn’t fake it – that was a certainty. Some people could pull it off, but not me. My outward appearance always reflected my mood. In other words, if I was angry, upset, anxious, or all of the above, it would show through very noticeably in my outward appearance – Wearing my emotions on my sleeve, so to speak.

Whatever solution I came up with would be temporary. I just needed something to get me through the first few exposures. With any luck – and this was a huge risk – I would have success with my socializing experiments and gradually experience less anxiety and become *happier?*. Was it possible?

But for now, I needed to concentrate on the task at hand, which was my outward appearance. I had been practicing my smile and it still looked bad unless I was thinking of something pleasant or funny. If I really concentrated, I could pull off a somewhat normal looking grin, but that would never work in public because I’d be more nervous and wouldn’t be able to concentrate.

I eventually borrowed a digital camera from my brother and I found this to be better than the mirror. I could relate to photographs because I had always taken a horrid picture and could never think of smiling for one. The beauty was that I could take as many snaps as I wanted and deleted them as I saw fit.

I used the one-arm-extended, head-shot, method mostly. The first few were so bad that I started blushing and beat myself up for being so ugly and weird. There was a reason that I never smiled for family photos and always maintained a neutral look: I took a horrible picture – end of story. I didn’t want anyone looking over photos years later and thinking how odd my expression was.

Having a tripod and timer, I took hundreds of shots – all possible angles and expressions – I mean, I really experimented. I kept this up for days and compared a few from the beginning with the current ones and, wouldn’t you know it, I could see an improvement.

The best shots were the ones where I had a natural smile. Usually this was a result of remembering something funny or watching a comedy on television– that sort of thing.

There had to be a way to use this in public.

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