life

When I was seven, I felt like a really big girl on the day I stepped into our local high school for dance camp. This was a five-day experience where the Dazzlers, the extremely cool, popular, way-older-than-me heroes I thought I would want to be like when I got older, taught us how to dance, just like they did for high school sports games.

Toward the beginning of the experience, they told us that they were going to give out a number of specific awards at the end of the week. One of them was “Miss Smiley.” Well, my seven year old self decided I really wanted to be Miss Smiley. So what did I do? For five days of my young, first-grade age life, I smiled consistently all day long like a cute, creepy freak.

Whether the music was playing —

You broke my heart, ’cause I couldn’t dance,
You didn’t even want me around,
Well now I’m back to let you know,
I can really shake it down.
Do you love me?
(This song by the Contours was the one for the dance they taught us) —

Or whether I was walking through the hall, eating lunch, or tying my shoes,

I was smiling SO BIG. So fake and contrived, but so consistent.

I am here to tell you that I did not win Miss Smiley. I was not even chosen to do this dance at the high school football game like some of the other little girls. I faked it until I did not make it.

Later in life, I would come to learn that sometimes, people expect women to smile a lot, and I would find that expectation to be sexist. It absolutely is.

But interestingly enough, people often tell me that they like how often I smile. It turns out that when it’s genuine and hard-wrought after having a full human range emotions, including difficult ones, it’s pretty contagious. I don’t have to have smiles (no awards, no sexism) but I’ll take it.

— Renee Roederer