Final Project: Smiling Exercise

For my Final Project, I was thinking of doing something like preforming arts. Something that I was inspired from my daily life, or something that I observed from myself, my own behaviors.

I think twenty is a very awkward age for me, feeling like I'm saying and doing all the wrong things and looking stupid and out of place. I always think things will get better as I get a little older, I'll look forward to growing up, and I'll always wonder if I'm thirty or forty now, will I be unconcerned or comfortable with the predicament I'm in now at twenty? But I also won't know what I'll be thinking about in ten years or twenty years.

I have always thought that emotional life is a very complicated topic for me, sometimes I think it is not important, and sometimes I think emotional life is important. What I mean by emotional life here is social, friendship, love, and family life. It is because I categorize them all as emotional life that this topic is simply huge for me. Ever since I was a kid, making friends, dating, or flirting with people, I was always aware of how I looked, did I look pretty? Did I offend anyone when I said that? I always play the role of a person who is always on thin ice in everything I do. But there are times when I don't seem to care too much about others. I feel like I'm different, but I'm not different from anyone else. Now I live in an age where everyone tells me to be myself. But in fact, what I call "being myself" exists in a moment, maybe at one moment, one second, I am, really being myself, I am very relaxed, and I feel that I am free in my life. But maybe no one saw such a moment, only myself, so I think it seems that doing many things is all about timing. But often the problem is not the timing, but why do I have to present myself to others as the "real, perfect" me? It's as if I'm performing.

Why do I have to practice smiling? Because I want people to like me, to be happy when they see my smile, and to like me for it. I want to present the best side of me to everyone socially. Maybe many people will notice, "Oh, you are pleasing others, I hope you can go on to be more yourself, to cater less to others, less to please others. But the truth is, I am like this! Because of my upbringing, I may at some point unconsciously show a pleasing demeanor, or a willingness to please others. But I do not feel that this is a manifestation of "not myself", nor do I feel that this is wrong. I prefer to gently embrace my imperfect self than to bravely correct my childhood trauma.

I think the smile exercise is a metaphor, a metaphor for the mishmash of self-perception and the shaping of others' vision.

Perhaps many of my peers share my confusion about social and emotional life and may be looking forward to an older self, a more perfect self, looking forward to this more perfect self to save their current selves from the worst. We may more or less do a "smile exercise" when we encounter difficulties in our own lives, to correct a self that does not conform to the mainstream culture of society. But more often than not, all we can do is wait alone, instead of practicing smiling, we should practice waiting.