Member-only story

Self-help for night owls and odd balls

Jessica Wildfire
7 min readApr 27, 2018

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Photo by Timothy Paul Smith on Unsplash

Smile. That’s what a teacher told me every day in high school. He didn’t teach any of my classes. Just saw me in the halls. I had this whole Lana Del Rey thing going on. Before it was cool.

Anyway, this teacher didn’t even know my name. But he wanted me to smile more. Never mind that my mom had tried to kill us that weekend. The police had dragged her out in handcuffs in front of our neighbors. One of the officers had looked at me and teared up. Rookie.

But smile.

Sometimes this teacher added a little pep talk. My problems would dissolve if I just changed my outlook. Made friends. Joined a church. Held my chin up and waved at people.

Maybe I should listen to more upbeat music, too.

He asked if I knew that smiling actually, scientifically, made you happier. That’s when I got suspicious. Sure, the studies existed. So I tried, and it did nothing but wear me out. After a day of smiling, I felt worse.

People also started to wonder if I was on meds. My smile doesn’t look natural. If I don’t feel like smiling, but I do it anyway, I look like a broken Westworld bot. Uncanny valley, here we come.

One night, I took another friend’s advice and tried praying. At 17, for the first time, I got on my knees and looked up at the moon. Forced…

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