I have one of “those faces”. I feel like recently in particular, I’ve had to say to people, “No, don’t worry. It’s just my face.” See, I have chronic “bitch-face”. It suuuuucks.
What’s bitch-face?
Well, beloved reader, bitch-face is basically when someone constantly looks like they want to drop kick a baby off the Grand Canyon while eating ice cream. Or, to put it to you this way, you know your face during traffic in the second hour when you’ve given up? Yeah, that face—that’s bitch-face. It’s having that face constantly—when you’re happy, sad, angry, very tired, and usually when you forget to have an external emotional reaction to something.
It never used to bother me until one night when my brother was talking to me about his relationship. I must have looked disinterested, because he looked at me finally and said, “You don’t actually care do you?” To be honest, it was an emotionally charged conversation and I did care, but I was thinking mostly about how to respond and forgot to actually do that.
I realize this makes me sound like a robot, and I’ve actually been called that before by people that still love me, but that’s—I guess, in a way—what bothers me about it. See, I joke about bitch-face a lot, but I really do mean it when I say it’s just my face. I’m terrible to read, because I’m an introvert and because I’m not good at expressing my feelings externally. Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t feel things. It just means I don’t like to put my emotions on display. I don’t cry in public, I don’t yell right away when I’m angry, and I don’t always say, “I love you”. I feel like I don’t show enough excitement because I don’t flail about screaming, and I don’t know why I am the way that I am, but I know that if I’m going to be that person that’s okay with who they are, then this is a part of me that I need to be okay with. And for me that’s really hard—in fact, it’s probably the thing I struggle with the most, that I’m willing to admit.
So, reader, I don’t know if this is a rant, or a plea or something else, but I do know that I don’t like being read, solely because I feel like most people get it wrong. I do feel things—a lot of things—but on a very private level. I do believe that I’m not the only person that’s like this. I think we all have private and public selves, but some people are just better at expressing themselves than I am. I do think that we have to be okay with who we are, even if it’s not something that’s easy to be okay with and, in a way, maybe for all of us, that’s our struggle.
