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Putting on smiles

I'm sitting outside the shop taking in the music in the park they have every year during artsfest. From what many of the locals have told me artsfest used to be a huge deal and would draw huge crowds... Most people I've talked to this year don't even realize it's occurring this week. Anyway, that's beside the point.

As I'm sitting here I can't help but think of artsfest last year. I hadn't been back at work for too long but we could tell no one knew what to say and started avoiding us (and therefore also avoiding the shop) so I did what I had to do for the business. I put on the biggest smile I could muster and passed out free samples to the people in the park. I made small talk and repeated over and over that we were doing ok... I don't know if people believed me but they didn't seem as scared to talk to us after that.

I wonder sometimes if I put on a smile too much... I use my blog as an outlet but rarely let people see the real me (in real life) and that's not how/who I want to be. I don't know how to be vulnerable without getting hurt, scaring people away or hurting them. I've slowly been letting people in- but still, as a whole, very guarded.

Comments

Kara's Mom said…
I too, have been hiding the real me (the griefstricken, broken, lost mother) from everyone but my husband. I had a customer say to me recently "Wow - you look and act like a normal person." I replied "You have no idea." That was the extent of my revelation. Grief is simply too difficult for people to understand unless they've been through it themselves. I wish we could stop worrying about other people's reactions to our own grief and just simply 'be'.

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