Smile!

"Hey lady, smile!"

The women among our readers will recognize the phrase...request...command?...or at least the situation.  You'll be going about your day, doing your thing, when a stranger will stop you on the street, or interrupt you at your desk.  "Smile!"

I smile.  I smile when I'm happy, and I smile when I want to, and sometimes I smile really hard because grinning negates the gag reflex.  But I also don't smile a lot - when I'm concentrating, when I'm deep in thought, when I'm pissed or miserable or coolly furious.  Humans, of which I am one, have a vast emotional range that gives depth and breadth beyond description to our every waking moment.

To boil the emotional integrity of my human experience down to smiling or not-smiling is to cheapen my existence to the barest modicum of consciousness.

"You'd be so pretty if you smiled!"

This is why the smile-guy is so fucking offensive.  I will smile when I goddamn feel like it.  That's what emotions, and their corresponding expressions, do.  I feel my feelings.  When that guy tells me to smile, not only is he interjecting his unwelcome and unsolicited judgement of my appearance and attitude, but he is cheapening my emotional integrity to suit his expectations.  I ought to smile because smiling is good.  Smiling makes ladies pretty.  A lady who doesn't smile...how could she be pretty...or good?

I recently had a man tell me he could no longer be my friend because I wasn't nice enough.  He liked me fine enough when I was happy, when I smiled.

But I bothered him; when I was busy and didn't give him the attention he felt was due, when I had bad days and got upset, when he tried to explain things to me and I challenged him on facts or assumptions, when I disagreed with his philosophy.

When I didn't smile.

I'm never happy to lose a friendship.  I'm sad loosing this one.  But I'm getting older now, and wiser, and harder and harder to bully.  We're all adults now, and we're all responsible for our own emotions. This guy, and his problems and his hurt feelings, he owns them.  I am beholden only to my own conscious.  I don't owe him, or the strange man on the street, my complicity.

And knowing that - it doesn't make me smile, but it makes me happy.