Frustrated, I would give my best effort to smile genuinely, but the harder I tried, the more artificial my smile would become. I was completely baffled on how to turn that phony smile into something real. But the mystery is hidden to me no longer…
Fast forward a few years…my little guy is the best smiler I’ve ever seen. His little baby mouth spreads into a beautiful, genuine smile whenever he’s happy…wait, that’s it…he’s happy. A baby can’t fake a smile to fool a photographer; his smile must be honest because he doesn’t know there can be a fake smile. So when he smiles, he really smiles!
Now before you think, “A childhood full of fake smiles, what awful things must Leah have faced,” that isn’t the case. I’m sure somewhere deep in my mother’s boxes of family photos there must be a picture of me smiling for real. And there were plenty of opportunities for pure joy in my childhood, but for some reason, cameras got a bad reputation in my little mind and just seeing one was enough to bring up the anxiety of another fake smile.
To get into the whys and hows, I’m sure it was really my own desire to see myself as pretty that got in the way of my smiles. In my college albums, I have lots of pictures of myself with great, happy smiles. I guess I got over my camera anxiety by then. Or maybe I got over my need to see myself as pretty in a picture and was just happy.
