“We adorn ourselves with practiced smiles, camouflaging the tears and trials, a perfect facade, a flawless art, shielding the depths of a fragile heart.” — Mary Gold Akoji, creative designer, speaker, and writer.
I can still vividly remember my first visit to a professional counselor in my early twenties, and her response after spending the first fifteen minutes or so listening to me explain why I was sitting in her office.
“You seem outgoing, even confident,” she said. “That’s a bit of a surprise from who I’m used to seeing.”
It wasn’t necessarily what I expected to hear from a professional, but it wasn’t entirely surprising either. I had spent years perfecting practiced smiles, also known as carefully constructed expressions designed to reassure the world that everything is fine, even when it isn’t.
I had become so accomplished at it that I had apparently fooled even the professional in the room whose entire purpose was to see past it.
There’s a persistent myth in our society that people who appear happy, well-adjusted, and confident are somehow immune to mental health struggles. And because of that myth, we rarely stop to ask those individuals if they’re truly doing okay.
To this day, I think about how effectively my practiced smiles concealed my mental struggles from friends, teachers, and even close family members.
Growing up in the late 1980s, mental health wasn’t something many people spoke about openly or understood with any real clarity. You simply pushed forward.
You internalized your struggles and constructed a perfect façade, not for yourself, but to ease the concern of everyone around you, and to avoid the discomfort that came with being seen as someone who wasn’t coping.
And so, we walk through the world looking at people and their practiced smiles, convincing ourselves they’re fine. That they’re not fighting anything. That they don’t lie awake at night with the same doubts and fears that keep the rest of us company.
The truth is that assumption deceives us far more often than we realize. What we see on the outside is almost never the full story.
A Man I Envied
I once worked alongside a man who appeared, from the outside, to be the very epitome of masculinity and confidence. He moved through life with an ease I genuinely envied, secure in himself and his work, comfortable in conversation, carrying the kind of presence that a judgmental society tends to reward in men without question.
I, on the other hand, am not naturally confident. I struggle with anxiety, and I have never aligned with the rigid, outdated definition of masculinity that society continues to impose on men and boys (the expectation of dominance, emotional detachment, competitiveness, and an almost willful absence of vulnerability).
In those early days of our working relationship, I did what I had always done. I kept my practiced smiles firmly in place and told myself the story I had been telling for years: that the gap I perceived between us was real, and that it said something definitive about my worth.
Then something shifted.
As we began working more closely together, the need to maintain a perfect façade, which is almost always at its strongest among new acquaintances, gradually subsided.
And what I found underneath it surprised me.
While our perceived differences may have been real on the surface, our actual differences were far smaller than I had assumed.
The confidence I had envied so deeply was, in many ways, nothing more than practiced smiles. A performance refined over years for the same reasons as mine, to fit in, to avoid scrutiny, to project a version of himself that the world would accept without question.
We All Have Practiced Smiles
Robin Williams once said, “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.”
That observation has stayed with me for years, and it proved itself true in that friendship in a way I didn’t expect.
As my coworker and I began talking more openly, sharing the kinds of things that men in our emotionally guarded culture rarely say out loud, I started to understand that while our journeys looked different from the outside, our struggles were not.
The need to belong. The desire to feel genuinely good about who you are. The quiet, persistent effort to not let the misguided opinions of others erode your sense of worth over time.
These are not unusual needs; they are fundamental ones. And yet they are routinely buried under a fictitious version of ourselves that we project into the world, carefully constructed to help us fit in, even when fitting in requires us to abandon what is actually true about who we are.
Belonging, as I have come to understand it, is not the same thing as fitting in. Fitting in is a performance. Belonging happens when you are fully accepted as you actually are, without apology or explanation.
That distinction matters more than most of us are willing to admit, and I suspect it sits at the root of more unhappiness than we are comfortable acknowledging.
We Are Enough
Search the internet, and you will find no shortage of books, videos, and articles about the struggles facing men and boys today.
Some of the reasons offered are complex, while others are completely idiotic (reading books is for beta males, society is trying to make men women, soy products make men weak).
But I think it’s much simpler: men and boys want what everyone wants. A life that feels meaningful. Connections that feel real. The quiet confidence that comes not from meeting someone else’s standard, but from knowing and accepting who you actually are.
I spent a long time not believing I was enough. Not masculine enough, not confident enough, not whatever enough, the world seemed to be measuring that particular day.
What I eventually came to understand, slowly, imperfectly, and with considerable help, is that practiced smiles are not strength. They are armor, and armor, however well-crafted, keeps out far more than it was ever meant to protect against.
The moment I began taking that armor off, even partially, I found that the people around me were carrying more than they let on. That the man I envied was struggling. That the people who seemed untouchable were, in fact, very much reachable.
The next time you are tempted to glance at someone’s easy smile and conclude that they are doing fine, resist that conclusion.
Ask questions instead. Be curious. Be present. You may be surprised to discover how much you have in common with the person standing right in front of you.
What you will find, more often than not, is that they have been waiting, sometimes for a very long time, for someone to simply ask.