Seeing the Face In Front of Me

My eldest daughter said something I have been thinking about now for a couple of days. "We northerners are not very good at killing people or situations with kindness." The reason I have been thinking abo0ut it because it stemmed from a conversation we had about a reaction I had to a bad situation. She noticed we both, instantly show what we are thinking all over our faces. I do not have a poker face, and apparently she has found out, neither does she. She may be right about the "killing with kindness" thing. Cynicism is easier to show. When I first took the job at the college, all I really knew for sure was I wanted to "see" each face that came up to the counter looking for help. I didn't want to be cynical, or judge people out of hand. I had that done to me, and I know for certain, I have never liked it. My only goal was to listen, empathize and to the best of my ability, see their face, recognize that they are human first, student second. As a nurse, I had to stop myself at times from judging a situation too quickly. It is too easy to make mistakes if I didn't take the time to really look, ask questions, and find out as much information as I could before I made a decision. One breath was all it took for me to slow time down to manageable bits. If I could take one breath, even during the most critical moments, then I could slow time enough to do the dig, before I made a tragic error. Lately, I have been breathing a lot. I have had to force myself to be mindful of my face and what reaction I may be showing. I noticed something remarkable, recently. My face is contemptible. I had thought I was keeping my face in check, not showing my inner dialogue, only to find out it was clearly marked all across my emotional puss. Me, the one who lectures about judging too quickly and too harshly was allowing my face to do the very thing I find contemptible. When someone first goes to college, whether they are a kid just out of school or an adult who has found themselves being down sized out of the only world they have ever known, they all have one constant between them. They are scared. They are uncertainty, they are confounded, they are utterly overwhelmed by the idea of starting the process because the one thing college does faster than anything else is overwhelm a body. The sheer demands of class work, expenses, time management, well, I remember wanting to take my own life a few times so to speak. When I had gone back to school in the 1990's, I was working 65 to 80 hours a week, taking classes, caring for my children and mowing my lawn, I thought, momentarily, mind you, but I actually thought, "Just kill me." My work goal of seeing people is probably the smartest things I have ever done in my nearly forty year work life. I am trying to learn the rest of the job, but the importance of seeing who is standing in front of me makes the rest look like details. Not everybody who leaves me is happy with what I have handed them. "No" is a big thing in this line of work, we have to say it many times. But in my very short experience, I notice that if I take a breath, look in their eyes, and just focus on them as a human being, regardless of how often I say "No" it never seems as bad as what they had originally projected. Here is where I have gotten it wrong. You had to know this part was coming, right? I have really screwed it up when it comes to seeing me as human. I have had survive some really devastating illness I realize now because I have viewed myself as more machine than human. I have forgiven a multitude of sins from others, but when it comes to me, I will re-live a misstep or mistake a thousand times grinding it in like ground glass, until I am certain I have been punished properly. Although I see my face everyday, I never stop to really see who is standing in front of me. Perfect strangers get treated better by me than I treat myself. That is really screwed up. Each morning I stagger into the shower, wash everything, rinse everything, and buff it dry. I tippy toe to the mirror, only looking for flaws. Does something need waxed, or covered up, or painted over? Do I need a hair cut, is the gray showing too much? I am, when in my bathroom, quite literally surrounded by mirrors, yet I never really look at my face. I never look into my own eyes. There always seems to be a look of disdain for my face, by my face. It's ridiculous. Knowing that I cannot unring a bell, I now know something I cannot unknow. I am not nice to me. This morning I spent almost 2 minutes looking at my face without myself to do the usual schtick of picking myself apart. I just stood in front of the mirror and thought about what expression I was seeing, I think for the very first time. I tried with only moderate success, to see what others see when they see me for the first time. In all honesty, without my usual out of hand condemnation, it needs work. Not Botox work, but definitely "Scowl, get the away from me" work. My face in it's entirety is perfectly acceptable. What I found unacceptable was all the scrunching of my facial muscles, as if I had just eaten sour fruit for the previous hour. Since we have been under so much stress lately, I thought my shoulders were literally shouldering the brunt of my muscular paralysis. Much to my surprise, it is my face that is the one really taking the beating. My mirror time was then put to use in trying to relax my face. I focused on individual muscles, getting them to relax, fall back into some sort of alignment, that didn't make me look like Play Dough that had been balled up and discarded. Once I felt like I looked remotely human again, I went about the business of being a girl. My findings in this face thing has been real shocker to me. I was deluded in the mindset that I was showing the world a relatively calm and happy face, when in reality I was showing them what I can only describe as someone who has eaten pooh. My goal is smile at least 20 times today. I plan to build this up to at least 50 times a day. I want to exercise my right not look like a pooh eating depressive. You might think you are smiley person, I sure thought I was, until I actually looked at my face. Go spend some uninterrupted mirror time. You might be as surprised as I was, at what is reflected back. Go ahead and indulge, what I also discovered is why so many people compliment me on my eyes.