I ran into my friend Anna the other day while walking through the Main Green. I think she yelled “Hi,” and after taking a graceful moment to recognize her, I responded with what bodylanguageproject.com calls “the tight lipped smile with low intensity.”
Apparently, the tight lipped smile with low intensity is a very dishonest smile and masks the distaste an individual has for the recipient–a rather unfortunate description because this is the smile I give to literally everyone.
I swear I don’t hate everyone! I just experience something not unlike a mini mental breakdown whenever I’m walking around outside and I unexpectedly see someone I know. On multiple occasions, my friends have mentioned that they felt afraid of saying hi to me because whenever they saw me walking around I looked “pained” or “frustrated” or “angry” or “300% done hahaha.” While it’s true that I frequently experience some combination of those emotions while roaming around doing my business, those descriptions make me worry a lot that people who don’t know me think I’m either shellshocked or possibly constipated.
Truthfully, I’m so lost in thought whenever I’m walking around, particularly when I’m walking around and listening to music (if you see me doing this combo, literally just ignore me because I’ve pretty much exited the temporal world tbh, sorry not sorry), that random run-ins are always very jarring experiences.
When I say “so lost in thought,” I mean that I’m listening to Zayn and Sia belt their unwavering commitment to each other on full blast while simultaneously doing mental edits of the cutting monologue I’ve crafted for the inconsiderate troll who cut me off moments earlier at the Blue Room cash register. It’s in the middle of these mental exercises that I suddenly run into Anna, who has a deep association in my brain with cold, dimly lit lectures, in broad daylight. What is she doing here and what do I do now? Obviously, she’s allowed to be in sunlight, but what is she doing in front of me like right now???? Until that moment, my attention was so entirely occupied by two intensely emotional and very scripted dialogues that I completely forgot how impromptu conversations work. Sure I could’ve said hi to her but I saw her mouth move first, and I had my headphones on, so I couldn’t hear what she said. Did she say hi? IDK! What if she said, “How are you?” If I just said hi and continued walking, that would’ve been really weird, right?
And this is where the smile comes in. The beauty of the human smile is that when executed properly, it conveys both the warmth of “Hello” and the optimism of “I’m good, thanks.” But, of course, I’m also very insecure about my teeth so I screwed it up completely and gave the pained “tight-lipped smile with low intensity” instead. Honestly, I was just trying to send her a message that my right front tooth is a fraction shorter than my left front tooth which angers me on a regular basis so hopefully she got that and not “I’m actually masking my distaste for you right now.”
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