God Bless This Mess(6)

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard phrases like these in my lifetime and thought, Great. Thanks a lot. Did I miss a Hannah 101 class in school or something?

All through life people say we should know ourselves, trust our guts, and listen to our hearts, as if there’s some all-knowing self inside us that’s completely ours alone. But how are we supposed to learn who that self really is?

I mean, honestly, would you be the same you if you were born somewhere else? If you looked different? If the people around you weren’t the same people you always knew, and didn’t influence you in the way they influenced you? How are we supposed to know who we are, when it’s all such a jumbled-up mess from the start? When does the way you grew up stop, and who you really are begin?

*

I think the confusion for me started when I was a little girl in Alabama, over the littlest thing: my dimples.

Yes, dimples.

You wouldn’t think somebody’s dimples would cause some kind of existential Who am I? crisis, but that’s kinda what they did for me. I had this big round face with round cheeks with these big squishy indents in them, which people always noticed. “Oh, look at those dimples!” they’d say while simultaneously pinching my cheeks without asking permission. The attention forced me to retreat behind my mom’s legs and cling to her, just hiding and wishing and praying that everyone would stop noticing me and pointing out how I looked, because that meant, it seemed to me, that something about me was weird.

My friends didn’t have big squishy indents on their faces. My Barbie dolls didn’t have dimples, either. Neither did my American Girl dolls.

My dimples made me different, and I did not see that as a good thing.

Couple that with the fact that I used to smile all the time, and you can imagine how awkward and uncomfortable I felt as a little kid. Only nobody knew I was uncomfortable, because I smiled all the time and tried to hide whatever I was feeling. I learned really quickly that if you cried and fussed, adults paid attention. “What’s wrong?” they’d say. “Is she okay?” I didn’t want that kind of attention. So instead of fussing and crying, I smiled. And my smile only made my dimples more noticeable. Ugh!

Still, putting a smile on my face was always better than the alternative, which to me was the horrifying thought of making other people uncomfortable. I never wanted to do that.

“You’re always smiling!” the adults would say. As if that was the best thing ever. As if smiling is what I was supposed to do. So I did—no matter what I was really feeling. The message I got before I was even in kindergarten was: you’re not supposed to show emotion that isn’t happy. So I turned every emotion into a smile.

Nervous? Smile. Happy? Smile. Worried? Smile. Hurt? Smile. People never knew that I had these really dark feelings because I always looked so happy. The smile was on the outside, but not always on the inside.

Of course, other kids (being honest in the way kids are) noticed, and sort of made fun of me for it. They would look at me smiling for no apparent reason and tease me. “What are you smiling at?” they’d say.

What I didn’t realize until very recently is that my smile was a shield of sorts, a hedge of protection. If I smiled, no one questioned anything. So why would I ever lower that shield? Not just as a kid, but as an adult, too.

I’ve realized in these past couple of years that I’ve been using that shield my whole life. No matter what it was, I’d smile through it. I’d laugh through it. That’s still the first instinct I go back to.

The smile is what I know and what I do to make sure nobody else is uncomfortable. Which of course begs the question: Why don’t I care about my own comfort? If people are uncomfortable, isn’t that their issue?

My mom didn’t seem to notice the smile-to-hide-my-emotions part of me in my early years, and neither did I. In a way, I think we both saw my smile as a gift. After all, a smile brings warmth and comfort to others.

But thankfully my mom did notice how much I hated my dimples, and one day she decided to do something about it. Right around the start of second grade, she sat me down to watch some old Shirley Temple movies. They were full of singing and dancing, and so much fun and joy. They were great. Then she told me all about how Shirley Temple became a big famous Hollywood star—specifically because of her dimples.

Well, I thought. That changes everything!

I didn’t realize people were pointing out my dimples because they liked them. I thought they were laughing at me. I thought they were pointing them out because I was some kind of freak for having these squishy holes in my cheeks that nobody else seemed to have.

Once I realized I could be proud of my dimples like Shirley Temple was, that made my smiling-shield habit that much easier to use.

Looking back, it’s amazing to me how just one afternoon of watching Shirley Temple movies, getting just one little bit of new perspective on something I hated so much, could turn that something into a positive for me. It shifted the way I looked at myself and felt about myself and carried myself from that point forward.

My dimples were a part of what made me me. They were cool! They made me stand out—not like some kind of freak, but because there was something special about the way I looked.

I liked that.

The fact that a negative can so easily be turned into a positive with a little perspective shift is something I should have clung to and kept reminding myself of from that moment forward. How great would it have been if, all through my childhood and teen years and early twenties, I’d reminded myself that anything that felt bad or hurt me or made me feel “less than” could be changed if I just took a little time to look into it and change it? Change my perspective, change my attitude. Of course I didn’t do that. Do any of us learn life lessons the first time we experience them? If so, I sure wish I could be that person! (Though I feel like that person is probably lying.)