Member-only story
No, I’m Not Mad, This Is How I Usually Look
I’m not the approachable type.
My smile seemed to wane in the jump from childhood to adolescence. Seemingly overnight, I became that girl — the one who scared people away with just a look, the one who had what people today have coined “resting bitch face.”
My problem? I didn’t make the connection until after I graduated high school.
For four years, I went through the halls of my school thinking there was nothing wrong and I was just a pariah for other reasons (like, for instance, having the best grades in my class despite not attending school as regularly as my peers — though that’s a story for another time). I wondered why so many people tended to avoid me, and they seemed surprised when I tried to engage them in conversation.
It was a lonely time, obviously. (And I wondered why I couldn’t get a date to my school’s equivalent of prom?) But I made it through, somehow, with some interesting stories to tell.
No one ever told me I looked mean to my face, but I’ve heard the dreaded words enough: “You should smile more.” I would then swallow my rebuttal that it wasn’t as if all of us could just smile on cue and make it look genuine instead of plastered-on.
