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| image credit Michal Marcol via FreeDigitalPhotos.net |
For most of my adult life, complete strangers have been coming up to me and telling me I should be smiling. Always men. Always significantly older. "You should smile, darlin'!" As if the thought would never occur to me otherwise.
Most of the time, I'm at a broadcast site, trying to do my job, i.e., setting up about a hundred different pieces of equipment that invariably aren't working, by a hard deadline because the show goes on whether the broadcast is set up or not. If someone is doing that with an orgiastic smile, you should drug test her. And then make her share. But usually, I'll be troubleshooting the piece of equipment that has inevitably decided to catch on fire, and some jerk will amble over and worry aloud about my face. Usually I have to look up from the interface of a broken console to even be aware that it's me. And yes, I'm usually staring at a machine with the same look a new mother has when she's tried everything and just can't figure out how to make the baby stop crying. But why would you interrupt someone who is clearly working on something (that you dragged yourself from the village of Whateverbucket to see), and interrupt her to dissapprove of her mood?
I usually chalk it up to the fact that they've probably never seen Thinkin' Face on a lady, and remind myself to feel bad for them.
But it happened again, and this time I wasn't even at work! I was in the neighborhood running errands, and I heard, "smile sweetie, it ain't that bad!" Some guy sitting on a bench outside the Sleepy's (which isn't even a bus stop so my wannabe social worker is a dude who chills at Sleepyses in strip malls). Now, I was on my way to the liquor store to buy wine. I was the happiest I'd been all day! And yet, still, my expression worried some slack-jawed ass enough to mention it (yell it) to me.
Apparently while my brain is going "I'm strolling through the neighborhood thinking about wine, yay," my traitor face is looking like it just wants an excuse to cut a bitch. Which, I found after some self-diagnosis on The Internet (specifically krisatomic and her lovely illustration), is a condition known as Bitchface.
I probably contracted Bitchface in college. My parents dumped me from our farm directly into North Philadelphia and sped away because the neighborhood scared them, and suddenly, if I ever wanted to set foot outside the protective red TU flags that marked the perimeter of our Green Zone, I had to learn to look like a badass mother-effer. And then my face probably froze like that on one of the days when they refused to cancel classes over a little thing like two feet of snow.
But no matter how it happened, I now have to face the idea of living my life knowing that, as happy as I am on the inside, to the world outside I will always look like I am ready to murder a puppy. At my wedding the priest will probably stress "you may now KISS," thinking I'll mishear it as "kill and devour," and then they'll have to reconsecrate the church. My children will wonder why I'm so mad that they get straight A's and dance all the solos in ballet. And there will always be a parade of strangers so worried over my mood that they'll need to remind me to smile, so they don't feel so afraid.
And it will always be Just My Face.
We Bitchface sufferers should design a medical-alert bracelet, so strangers don't have to wonder: "That girl looks so angry, which bothers me enough to need to address the situat--oooooh, she just has Bitchface. Whew, I guess she's not out to murder us after all!" The bracelet could look like this:
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And we can wear them proudly, until there is a cure.
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