Only If I Mean It: A Quiet Rebellion Against Borrowed Expressions

This past year, I made a quiet decision. Nothing dramatic, no big turning point. Just a subtle shift in how I show up in one particular space:

Photos.

I’m no longer smiling in pictures just because I’m supposed to. It might sound minor. It’s not.

Like many women, and in truth, many people of all genders, I’ve spent years being told what my face should be doing.

“Smile, you look mad.”

“You okay?”

“You’d look so much prettier if you smiled.”

But the truth is, I was usually fine. Just thinking, or observing, or being present. Just quiet.

And honestly, I was never very good at smiling on command.

I tried, oh, I tried. Because I thought I was supposed to. But in truth, it always felt like I was borrowing someone else’s smile. Maybe I thought that if I could just master it, I’d feel more at ease in my own skin and not like I was failing some basic social test that everyone else seemed to pass without effort. But the smile I borrowed never quite fit.

When a smile is real—when your face reflects how you actually feel—it lands. In behavioral health, we call this emotional congruence: when our outward expressions match our internal experience. Research in psychology distinguishes between genuine “Duchenne” smiles, which engage both the eyes and the mouth, and polite, social smiles. Genuine smiles are perceived as more authentic and foster greater trust and connection.

And authenticity isn’t just something we sense in others. It’s something that shapes our inner lives, too. A 2020 study published in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology found that people who scored higher on measures of authenticity also scored higher on mindfulness and emotional intelligence. Specifically, “authentic living” was linked with emotional intelligence, while “self-alienation” was associated with lower mindfulness. The more we’re in alignment with ourselves, the more present and connected we tend to be—with others, and with our own experience.

At some point, I stopped trying to match an idea of what I should look like and started letting my expression reflect how I actually feel. Even when that’s stillness. Even when it’s just... quiet.

There’s a theory I’ve seen in a few places, more intuitive than clinical, that authenticity carries the highest frequency. Not joy. Not love. But the experience of being aligned: inner state and outward expression matching. No performance. No translation. Just you, as you are. What’s more beautiful than that?

So if you see a photo of me now and I’m not smiling, it’s not because something’s wrong. I’m a person who laughs easily, loves deeply, and is grateful for the life I have. And when that joy shows up on my face, I mean it.

And when it doesn’t, I mean that too.

It just means I’m not trying on someone else’s smile.

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__________ References:

1. Ekman, P., Davidson, R. J., &; Friesen, W. V. (1990). The Duchenne smile: Emotional expression and brain physiology II. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58(2), 342–353.

2. Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press. Wood, A. M., Linley, P. A., Maltby, J., Baliousis, M., &; Joseph, S. (2008). The authentic personality: A theoretical and empirical conceptualization and the development of the Authenticity Scale. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 55(3), 385–399.

3. "I almost wish we could smile in photographs." A Million Ways to Die in the West © Universal Pictures 2014.