Do Your Outsides Match Your Insides?

I don’t look the way I feel.

I feel like I’m just a little chubby, in a healthy way. I feel badass. I feel wise. I feel like a force to be reckoned with. I feel like I demand respect and attention. Then I see myself in the mirror, and I look fat and child-like. It frustrates me to no end. I want the two to match. I want what I feel on the inside to be reflected on the outside. You’d think how I feel on the inside would shine through.

Maybe I do look how I feel – until I see myself. Once I see myself, then I’m in my head. Then I start to judge myself and I manifest those judgments. Maybe I can’t ever witness myself in those ways, because then I start to influence reality. Negative feedback.

I always wished I had video footage of myself going through my day so I could analyze how I come off to others. You never know until you see it for yourself. I do a fairly good job without it, but I just go off of how people respond to me. If I could see myself, I’m sure I could fine-tune myself much better and uncover things about myself that I perhaps wasn’t aware of.

The other day I was working on my “plastic smile”. As a dancer, you’re expected to portray emotion, and generally I just look serious. Someone would say, “Smile! Look like you’re having fun!” Then comes the fake smile. It looks fake because it is. I’m having fun, but smiling isn’t my thing. Not like that. I decided this might be another area where I am sabotaging myself based on old beliefs and old experiences. So I tried to think about some of my memories involving smiling. In high school, someone told me my plastic smile looked creepy (the person had seen me perform in a fashion show). I didn’t like how I looked smiling, and the times I saw myself smiling, there wasn’t legit joy behind it. So that made me not want to smile in pictures and whatnot. Because it didn’t look good. And it didn’t feel right. So I’m thinking that’s continuing through adulthood.

I saw someone else dance and smile at the same time. I tried to mimic it, but it looked horrible. Then I got it. It’s because the smile is fake (duh). Don’t worry so much about “smiling”. Instead, work on letting out some of that joy. I could feel the difference. For the plastic smile, the cheeks go more up and out, whereas a true smile just goes up. At least for me. My teeth don’t show as much for a true smile. A laugh is different… but yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever really “truly” smiled. It’s definitely a new feeling for me. It feels weird. It makes me a little uncomfortable actually. Maybe smiling makes me feel vulnerable? I don’t know, it just doesn’t feel natural.

Now that I know this, I’m going to work on it…

In what ways do your insides and outsides match and mismatch?