There’s a type of smile that everyone knows about. The fake, plastic smile that we plaster on everyday before we head into school. The smile that shows people that we’re happy and that we are okay, but in reality, we know that we’re not. Some people use it to help them feel better about themselves, others use to pretend that they’re happy. I use it to hide myself from others. It’s not like it's a bad thing to close yourself off from people. Is it?

Smiling is just another way of showing people who you really are. It can either help you or break you. And for me, it’s in between. I don’t enjoy showing people who I truly am, so I tend to just fake it. I tend to just fake a personality and stick with it around certain people, everyone knows a different me. But do any of them actually know the real me?

Some of the smiling faces around us are all just full of lies. They hide their pain behind the mask, hoping that others won’t notice. I look around myself and realize, it’s not very hard to fake smile. It’s just another way for other people view you.

I remember walking through the halls everyday, smiling, without a care in the world. Until one day, I couldn’t. I couldn’t smile. I couldn’t smile without having to force it on my face. I would look in the mirror and ask myself why I was doing this. Soon it turned into something that just became a habit and I couldn’t even tell if I was truly happy myself. Again, I look in the mirror and ask myself why am I doing this. How is this going to help me? That’s something that I don’t know. There are a lot of things that I don’t know and this just happens to be one of them.

Sometimes I even go to a mirror and practice smiling to see if it looks genuine, it’s hard to do, but do I really have another choice? I feel like it’s something everyone has to go through.

It’s not like I have a terrible life where I don’t know how to do anything other than wear this mask. I have friends, I play a sport, but sometimes it’s just easier to get along with someone if they don’t know how you’re truly feeling. Or at least, that’s how I feel.

I have this friend. He’s really nice and all, but sometimes I don’t feel like I can truly be myself around him. I smile when I’m around him most of the time, but it’s hard for me to tell whether the smile is fake or if I’m truly happy. I walk up to him and, of course, I smile and we have fun. But the thing is, I feel like I’m not showing him who I really am. And it’s not fair. I shouldn’t have to fake a smile around someone that I really like being around. Especially if it’s someone like him, he listens to me whenever I have problems and he doesn’t judge me. It’s not fair to the other person that they don’t know that I’m doing this. Or why I’m doing this. I fake a smile around him because I feel like he shouldn’t have to carry the burden of knowing that I’m not always feeling happy or up to it. And sometimes I think that I have to be like everyone else and just go along with everything and smile, like we don’t really care about how we really feel.

I think people like fake smiling because it can be an escape from reality and all the emotions we actually feel. It can be an escape from things that you feel like you’re going through alone, but you’re really not. Fake smiling is just another way to avoid questions. Some people feel like just a single smile, a fake smile, can cover up anything. And to me, it can. It makes everything easier to hide and people don’t know that you’re actually in so much pain on the inside. It does help, but that doesn’t mean that you’re always going to be able to fool people. A true smile never lies, but a fake one does.