Pardon My Expression
Or what it’s like to live without a poker face...
If one more person tells me I have to be more aware of my facial expressions, I might actually have to do something about them. Yes. I’m that person. The person with absolutely NO poker face. None.
It’s gotten me into trouble so many times. I’m good at lots of things, but subtlety isn’t one of my gifts. Diplomacy? Not this girl, at least not very often.
Not only do my grins and sneers and frowns and eye-rolling––yes, eyerolling––get me into trouble, I can also be defensive when called out about this malleable mug of mine. I have extremely expressive eyebrows…They’ve served me well, or not. All depends on your point of view.
My face? It’s like rubber or Play-Doh. Active. Mobile. Pliant. Want my opinion about something? You don’t even need to ask. Just take a gander at this punim1. You’ll get all the information you need…and probably some you don’t!
Poker face. The definition from Merriam-Webster: an inscrutable face that reveals no hint of a person's thoughts or feelings.
Yeah. That’s not me. I can’t hide a thing from anyone, unless I’m lying on purpose…but I’m not a very good liar, so maybe not even that. Fake it? Nah. I want the whole world to see what I’m feeling…I just don’t want to own those feelings by speaking them, and it’s not always possible, practical, or safe to voice my concerns, judgements, or reactions to a particular situation.
When I examine this tic––can it be called a tic? Or am I just deferring responsibility for my actions? I wonder why I’ve been so bad at concealing my thoughts and reactions.
All my life, I needed to express my feelings, but I wasn’t quite sure how. I wasn’t encouraged to say what was really going on with me. I came from a family where what was on the surface seemed to be the most important information to convey. Appearance was everything. The overriding sensibility was “we must look good to the world.” It didn’t matter what was truly happening. For a long time, I had no idea how messed up things really were in my family, at least consciously. I thought all was well. That was the message my brother and I received, and I bought it.
Until I couldn’t anymore. And I got mad, and then I stuffed that feeling and worried about what others needed instead of learning to take care of myself.
After a while, I lost the ability to even know what I was feeling. My words went missing. But deep inside, the feelings were there. I’d be angry, sad, happy, dismayed. I’d feel hurt, lonely, misunderstood. I just couldn’t verbalize what was going on. I learned to shut that part of me down. You know the phrase parents use to get their kids to talk about what’s going on with them when they’re acting out? “Use your words.” I couldn’t do that. Not until pretty recently. My inability to express myself often morphed into repeated bouts of severe depression.
If people asked me how I was, I’d just say, “fine.” In 12 Step programs there’s an acronym for the word fine: Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional. Yeah. That’s more like it.
I’ve always been told I have a great smile. I think it’s true, I do have a great smile. My smile comes out when I’m truly delighted, happy for myself or someone else. I got really good at smiling as a kid. I was happy a lot of the time. But here’s the sad piece: even when I wasn’t happy, my training ran deep. I smiled even when I was miserable. But at some point, something shifted for me. I didn’t have a vocabulary for my feelings, but I did start feeling them. And those feelings were expressed with my face before the words could join in.
When I was a teenager, I went to a camp that taught clowning and mime. Yes, mime. It was the 1970s. Mon ami, Marcel Marceau, and my pals Shields and Yarnell were hot, and I wanted to be just like them, mostly because I was a nerdy, geeky teenager who wanted nothing more than to hide behind whiteface. I used to wear full clown makeup to school and I refused to speak. I was weird, but I was also desperate for attention, any attention.
When you’re a clown or a mime, you have to be able to convey feelings and communicate ideas without words. You use your body, and you definitely use your face. Laugh, clown, laugh. Frown, smile, rage, disapprove. And everything has to be bigger than life. I got some great practice.
There are tons of baby pictures that show me laughing, crying, frowning, furrowing. When someone takes my photo today, I open my mouth up wide, all personality. A great big smile, sparkly eyes. It’s automatic. I have no idea why I do it, I’ve done it since childhood. My pose. It’s a reflex, as if I’m on stage, overacting, being bigger than I really feel. Look at me! Don’t look at me.
I emote. When I sit in a 12 Step meeting, listening to others share their successes and their struggles, my Zoom face is an open book. Everyone knows how I feel. I give great face, all different kinds: supportive, compassionate, loving, concerned. I’ve got them all down, they’re second nature, and they’re sincere. No phony faces on me. But that’s the problem. I think part of it is unconsciously motivated by that desire for attention that I mentioned earlier, but my expressions are genuine, some of them come from a loving place and the rest come from a censoring, controlling, critical place. When I disapprove of something someone says or does, or doesn’t do, they see those reactions as well. Not just the person sharing, but everyone in the room if they happen to be looking my way. How do I know this? My sponsor called me out more than once. She let me know I had to work on it, that people saw me. That I had to remain more neutral. Other people in my meeting have mentioned it as well, as recently as last week. One woman said, “Girl, I’ve got my eyes on you!!”
It's not good. I’ve finally accepted that I’m not invisible and my actions, whether verbally expressed or facially, have an impact on the people around me.
I’m tuning in, trying to be more self-aware, and often, if I feel a reaction coming on, I discreetly cover my mouth or turn off my camera, until it passes. And I get curious about what’s going on with me. Why so judgy, so controlling? I often have no idea I’m doing it…even though I’m looking right at my own face on my laptop screen, until it’s too late.
I know I’m making progress, and I don’t smile when I’m sad anymore. So, when I smile at you, or anyone else, you can be damn sure it’s real. I’m working on the rest.
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Yiddish for “face"
Nan, having seen you only a few times on zoom, i have to say your facial expressions are memorable and made me want to know more about you. I hope you don't censor what seems to me a huge gift from Nature. Yes, to feign a happy face when you're not is something that I've worked to eliminate myself. But I actually enjoy being able to tell how you feel including those so-called judgmental feelings. I treasure a person who is an open book of emotions. Perhaps that's even more so due to my experience of being lied to with a poker face for years by an intimate partner.
I myself grew up conditioned in much the same way as you did. My culture is all about "saving face," putting up a good "face" for others to see. But I was so unhappy in my teenage years and my gripes were taken as weakness in my family. So I learned to remove all expressions from my face to stay safe. My classmates told me they couldn't figure me out.
Luckily, I've learned to reclaim my natural expressiveness over the years, while using my poker face selectively (gray rock) to handle narcissists.
I wasn't a smiler and was chided for it. "Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone." I love the baby pics though I think I might've labeled them differently. xo