Happy Face 4

A random guy on the sidewalk recently told me that I have a nicer smile than him. That seemed rather odd, not just because this was coming from some random guy, but because I was feeling at the time quite sad and upset, already explored in the last two posts. Of course, I said thank you, and then wondered at how skilled I have become at putting on the proverbial happy face. This isn't to say that there was an absence of good will, or care for others. Regardless of my emotional state, those things are always more or less extant. I don't want people to see me as miserable, I don't want to make people uncomfortable with my sadness, and I don't want pity. So, why is it often the saddest and the most disenfranchised among us who smile the most? This is complex. I think that for many of us, we have tapped an inner sense of joy and gratitude, just from all the hard work that we have to do in order to cope, and also from the massive exploration and self-understanding we end up going through in order to make better sense of our lives and situations. This doesn't necessarily make us stronger people. Wiser, perhaps. But we are also often socially isolated and sometimes very lonely. We often have plenty of friends, but in my case there is not going to be a lot of depth or substance there, and we end up having a lot of fair weather friends who simply are not going to be there when we need them the most. Yet, there is the expectation that we are going to be there for them in their hour of need. This is patently unfair, and I have decided that I do not want people like this as friends. I am prepared to negotiate, if they are, but I am going to have to distance myself from those same individuals for my own safety and protection. Socially-isolated people, who have a sense of gratitude for the little we have, and a sense of joy because we simply are grateful that we are still breathing, people like us are enormously tempting to those who want a little extra spiritual nourishment without having to pay for it. And we are so needy of friends that even this illusion of friendship is better than nothing, so we get suckered into these friendships with selfish and well-supported individuals who treat us like emotional prostitutes. They are our johns, or clients. And we are paid by them in friendship, or an illusion of friendship. Yes, I get it now. This is a kind of putting out for the selfish. And we, the marginalized, also feel temporarily satisfied because we think that we have a friend. But do we really? There is more to me, there is more to us, than our simply existing to enrich the lives of thankless and self-centred bourgeois consumers. Yet, it is hard to communicate this to the perennially selfish, because we are already vulnerable, we are already lonely and without the ballast of friends and family. We know that those same self-preoccupied individuals are going to be way more concerned about their professional and career advancement, and their own families and tight social circles, and in many cases they don't wish to be too openly associated with us because we are also for them a social embarrassment. They don't want to be put in the awkward position of feeling that they have to somehow explain us to their friends or families. So, they go on excluding us, contacting us only for their little spiritual or emotional fix, paying us with the illusion of their undying gratitude and friendship, then flaking off again. We are not allowed to phone them, we are not allowed to talk to them if they are in public with their partner, family members or intimate friends, unless they choose to acknowledge us. We will not get invited to their social gatherings or weddings. We are embarrassing to them. Neither will they invite us into their homes and for the same reason. And Christmas? Forget it. If we express sadness and anguish because we are going to be alone and they're not, then it's going to be our fault for being so needy. With friends like that, who needs enemas! But we have to keep smiling and keep soldiering on because, in the end, we are all alone, way more alone than any of those narcissistic bourgeois twits, who keep mistaking our happy face for joy over their existence. We are smiling because the alternative is too frightening to even want to think about. Go sit on a happy face. If it's going to be mine, then at least pay me for the pleasure.