c:

I’ve had people say to me—and I’ve also sensed them thinking—you know, Ethar, you should smile at all times. You should walk down the street smiling. (I’m a walker—a hiker, in fact. I take an hour or two hours’ walk, on certain days. Most other days, it’s half an hour, or under an hour.) “You should walk down the street smiling. That way, people won’t get turned off by you.” I’ve never heard of someone telling a white woman (or a white man, for that matter) to “smile at all times.” Not once in my life. Their skin is already smiling, I suppose. That’s why their faces don’t have to be stretched in smiles, all the time. My own very dark complexion is off-putting, I guess. That’s why I need to counteract it with an amiable expression. Well, no, in fact. I don’t need to do something like that. I need to (continue to) suffer through any deep-seated pain, in my psychological sphere. I need to ‘feel what I have to feel,’ at all times. Smiling? Forcing a smile? I don’t believe in forcing oneself to do anything, in fact—anything other than the mandatory tasks of life. Hygiene, cleanliness, running errands for the house, work, rest, maintaining connections with friends and family, etc. Other than that, I don’t believe in forcing oneself to do anything, at all. | I don’t really know anyone, in life—so I don’t know what these people keep wanting from me, or expecting from me. These people on the phone who give me a hard time, these “professionals” in society that I am forced to interact with. Teachers, college professors (at the local colleges in my area that I’d attended for some years), health care professionals, store clerks, stuff like that. This is even so with strangers whom I happen to have some sort of chance interactions with–bumping into or brushing against, by pure misfortune. Accidentally meeting or colliding with, both literally and figuratively. Regardless of the specific circumstance, there’s been a long and painful pattern of abuse. It wasn’t everyone—it was a small minority of people, by necessity. My understanding of strangers and similarly-aligned folks is that they don’t know you, and will never know you, as obvious as that might sound. And so why not practice mindfulness wherever one goes–whether one is in the company of others, or not. You should be in mindfulness practice whether you’re conversing with a service provider in the community, or whether you’re walking down a crowded street, or whether you’re walking up your front steps to enter your house. It’s not a question of smiling or not smiling, being animated or being worn-down, at any given moment. It’s a question of dealing with the unique challenges of each moment, as they come. Every moment can potentially bring excruciating pain and fear, depending on intrusive thoughts, bad memories from the past, or an overall feeling of foreboding and disquiet. And anxiety about the future, of course. Sometimes one’s negative feelings are related to one’s own appearance, in respect to the hours during which one is out and about, in town. Other times, the painful emotions are simply human-condition related; it’s nothing to do with one’s blackness, at that particular moment. Or one’s dark skin. | I’ve learned that my own personal ‘solution’ is to suffer through the pain. Stay with it. Let it be; don’t try to do anything. You’re standing on quicksand, at that point; the more you try to leave and get out, the further you sink down. Oftentimes, the discomfort doesn’t leave until it organically leaves, on its own. Nothing is a cure; there’s no cure. In terms of staying with it, and suffering it; I like to think of the whole thing as spiritual incisions or cuts into my heart, which then releases stored-up pain. It’s a cleansing process; every second of suffering is a self-cleansing. It’s a natural process, and a life-long process.