Poor Facial Control

A friend's mom told me I had poor facial control when I was 15. I'm not friends with that friend anymore, and her mom was a straight up bitch, objectively, but she may not have been wrong about my face. 

I hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about my face until I started getting negative feedback on it. Was I not supposed to use my eyes, nose, and mouth to convey to the world what I was feeling on the inside? As a teenager, what I was often feeling was smug superiority, disgust, confusion, elation, or a marijuana-infused apathy. I felt everything. I was fucking 15 years old. 

I did not know how to filter my facial expressions then (I still don't, really.) I hadn't ever considered it. But that woman's snide, passing comment was an observation I internalized and shelved among my many other volumes of self-understanding. I would pull it from the shelf and reference it often in the decades that followed. It wasn't a good read, and it wore me down. 

So, when I came across the eye-opening, life-changing, revelatory Stop Telling Women to Smile campaign a few years back, it set fire to my inner library. I was 30 years old. A GROWN WOMAN. And it was literally the first time I thought to myself, "Wait, a minute. I'm not SUPPOSED to be smiling? My face is not SUPPOSED to be pleasing others with the proper expression at all times?" In a moment, I was free. 

It's embarrassing now, to think of how long I spent feeling like a failure. Like my face wasn't quite right, and as a result, I wasn't quite right. I didn't smile. I wasn't nice. I wasn't pleasing to look at. I wasn't friendly. BUT NO. When I turned that mirror around and scrutinized the system that told me when and how to shut my mouth and turn its corners up, it made sense for the first time. 

My face is nobody's business but mine. Now you know.