The Smile – It’s Lopsided

Your smile. It can be something that you share often and use freely or something that you hide and might not bring out very often.

Let’s admit it, if you are being really honest, you are similar to most of us and when you see yourself in a picture, you quickly make a judgment on how your face looks. How your smile looks, etc. Probably in a negative way.

When you and I look at the picture above, we are going to see differently things. Possibly very different things.

We can really be our biggest critics about those kind of things. How we look in those pictures. The photogenic gene that many are blessed with, wasn’t handed out to everyone.

I used to consider myself one of those people. For whatever reason I got at least a small portion of the photogenic gene. It was great. School pictures as a kid weren’t really an issue.

But friends, you have likely learned just like I have about how things in our lives can change. Things can change in the most unexpected ways and through any number of circumstances.

Years ago I went through my thyroid cancer journey. That was when things really altered for me. The treatment path I chose pushed me through some traumatic things. One of those things was a quite extensive neck surgery.

I learned just how important our neck is during that process. Boy is it ever important. It has a lot of pretty critical things in it like nerves, tendons, trachea, spine, thyroid, and more. Things that we all need.

My surgery was successful. But the surgeon needed to do a more extensive surgery than usual he worked on the front of my neck as well as the side. As a consequence of this, the left side of my face as well as the left side of my upper body was greatly affected.

I won’t go in to details but it took months to recover from the physical side effects of my surgery. During that time I wasn’t really sure if I would recover. In the end, I did regain most of my mobility but have permanent changes to my neck and upper body because of it.

One of those changes is in how I smile, and how I hold my head when I smile. Like you might expect, it is something that I am very aware of, but most others might not even notice. I think we all have those things about ourselves, don’t we? Things we are self-conscious of but those around us wouldn’t even notice.

Something I am now much more self-conscious is much more noticeable it is when I am tired or under more stress. I can actually feel my face muscles shift and struggle to do what I want them to do and make that one side of my face more droopy.

And now when I look at pictures I’m in, there are sometimes I can really see the physical effects of my surgery on my face. Let me tell you friend, that can just get so frustrating.

So how should you and I respond to these kinds of things in our lives? I am sure that you have something in your life that you can relate to like this. It might be physical, emotional or mental. If you have been following for very long you might know what I am about to say.

How do we handle these things? I think it comes down to choice. Yes, you guessed it, choice. You and I have all the power to choose how we respond. How do you respond when this comes up for you? Whether you see it in pictures of yourself or be reminded of it in other ways, how will you respond?

I know that I could choose to be frustrated and defeated every time I look in the mirror or see myself in pictures with the crooked smile or the crooked neck. But would that change anything or make it better? Probably not. I can choose to not go negative. Does that mean it’s easy? Oh no, friend, oh no. Not even close.

But it makes it even more worth while to make a hard choice. The hard choice to not judge myself or be embarrassed. I would rather not look in the mirror and have a negative response. There is no up side to that for me. None!

Another choice I could make is that if I’m frustrated with that thing in my life, I need to think about whether there is something about it that I can change. Another choice. You and I could choose to make a change to make it better. Maybe there isn’t something that you could do, but responding in that positive, how can I make this better way I think is always a better path to go on.

For me, I would love to go back to the way things were before my surgery, but since I cannot change that, I need to choose how I can make this the best it can be and even embrace it.

What about you friend? Does this resonate with you about something in your life? Is there something that you can think about differently? What are you going to choose to do with it?

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