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Céline Artaud's avatar

This is breathtaking, not just in what it says, but in how it says it. Every line hums with the kind of emotional x-ray vision that most of us spend our whole lives trying to avoid developing. You’ve taken the smile—this seemingly benign, universal gesture—and cracked it open to reveal its whole architecture of cultural coding, gendered conditioning, and silent defiance.

What resonated most deeply for me was the idea of the endurance smile, of course, the one we wear to survive spaces not made for us. That smile is its own language. I think of it as a kind of emotional Esperanto: a shared, globally understood shorthand for “don’t ask,” “don’t look too closely,” “don’t make this harder than it already is.” I’ve worn that smile in waiting rooms and weddings alike, the places where I was either too broken to show up fully or too full to break in front of others. And like you, I’ve watched people read it as grace, never knowing it was grief dressed in its Sunday best.

But you added a nuance I hadn’t considered before: the smile as a form of refusal. A refusal to collapse. A refusal to let someone else edit your pain into pity. That part, the smile that says “you don’t get to narrate this for me”, that cut the deepest. I’ve felt that smile rise in me like armor, like ritual, like a spell cast not to deceive but to protect a dignity that words couldn’t salvage in the moment.

I would add the heirloom smile. Not only the ancestral kind, like your grandmother’s (though that is so profound) but the one passed down less consciously, more like scar tissue than scripture. I’ve seen this with trauma: a mother teaching her daughter to smile through dismissal so smoothly it looks like elegance, not erasure. These smiles become habits, but also haunted gestures, ghosts in the muscles. We inherit the reasons to smile but also the consequences of not doing so.

And still, like you, I believe in the cracked ones. The imperfect, asymmetrical, glimmering smiles that slip out when we’re not guarding the gates. I remember a friend whose smile only ever appeared when she was talking about her dog, or eating olives. It didn’t perform. It just arrived. It was holy because it was uncurated.

Thank you for this, Tamara. I’ll be thinking about it every time I catch myself smiling for someone else’s comfort.

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AGK's avatar

I don't smile a lot - not for any emotional reason, but because that's just my physiology. I can get away with it, because I'm a man and there's a double-standard that works to men's benefit in this regard. If anything, it probably works in my favor that I'm not so expressive because people chalk it up to being stoic.

That's really what you're pinpointing here: the performative aspect of expressions, and the expectations that come with them. Smiling is "nice" and in many contexts it can be an important signal, particularly of safety. Small talk isn't really about content, and asking "how someone is" is an expression of how YOU are, and is not an actual inquiry into another person's state. Really, we're saying "I'm fine" when we ask how someone else is. Or at least "you have nothing to fear from me."

Because smiling is a signal of safety or invitation, your suspicion is warranted.

The common thread in your examples is the self-referential nature of expression and even most communication. Words and gestures that appear, on the surface, to be for others, are almost always something more complex: they're an expression of our state of mind, body and emotional reactivity. So maybe the key to understanding people's expressions is to realize that even when they're directed at us, they're almost never actually about us; almost never personal.

Excellent, Tamara. I hope you're smiling, for yourself only.

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