You look...

"You look tired."

Really? I was feeling pretty good today, actually. Until now.

"Are you ok? You look upset."

Um, I was just thinking about whether to cook pasta or tacos for dinner.

"Hey, lighten up. You look like you're about to kill someone."

Nope, wrong again. Just enjoying the view out my window.



Why don't people ever tell me "You look like you're glowing today!" or "Wow, you look so refreshed!" Is it really that I look bad all the time, that I'm not getting enough sleep, that I have clinical depression and so cannot muster enough energy to keep a smile on my face? Or is it that the lines of my face were originally drawn in a certain shape, and it takes a lot to align them in a way that fits people's idea of what a "happy person" looks like? Yes, I feel down much of the time. But I also feel good and contented quite often. Yesterday I had a great class in the morning and I was feeling pretty good about the day, but then a colleague hit me with that first line: "You look tired." I did have a rough weekend, so maybe it takes more than a good morning to counteract the effects of two really hard days. Maybe now that I'm in my thirties, I can't spend a whole evening crying and expect my face to show no signs of it the next morning.

(The story of why I was crying is not relevant. No worries, it's nothing too serious. Just beating myself up over a mistake I made. I'm slowly getting over it.)

Okay, to satisfy your curiosity, this is my face when I am not thinking or feeling anything--just letting my face fall as it may:



Do I look mad? Depressed? Bored?

Here I am thinking about something irritating:



Hmm...not too different. It's funny, I just snapped these pics and didn't look at them too closely. It felt like I was really making an effort to show my irritation, but you can't really see that.

Okay, well here I am thinking of something light and happy:



See, again I really felt my smile muscles stretching. I totally felt like I had a big grin on my face, but it looks like a forced smile in this picture.

I am so afraid of being over-the-top, of people thinking that I'm trying to attract attention to myself, that I rein my expressions in to err on the side of masking my feelings. That, or I really do have the "flat affect" that is commonly seen in people with depression. It takes A LOT for me to show strong feelings on my face, no matter how I may be processing on the inside.

But is that okay? Do I need to walk around with a smile stretched across my face in order to make others feel more comfortable around me? The thought of that just exhausts me. Maybe someday, with therapy and medication, I will be able to break into a smile that can light up a room, or a scowl that makes my enemies scurry into hiding. For now, I'm just ho-hum me. I enjoy life enough. I make an effort to let people know that I am happy for them or hurting for them, and then I come home and crash from the sheer weight of my own face. That's a burden I have to live with right now.

What does your face tell the world?