April 22, 2025

By Lianne Okoro

I recently started a new job—customer-facing, lots of Zoom calls, tons of “professional warmth.” You know the type. The kind where you’re expected to radiate positivity, build rapport, smile like your paycheck depends on it. (Because… it kind of does.)

But here’s the kicker: I genuinely forgot how to smile.

Years ago, I moved from the South, where friendliness is almost a reflex, to a colder, more reserved northern city. Slowly, I stopped smiling at strangers. Then acquaintances. Eventually, even with friends and coworkers, I just… stopped. It wasn’t intentional. It’s like my face unlearned it from lack of use.

Fast forward to this new job, and suddenly I’m required to be “on” all the time. Smile when you speak. Smile when you listen. Smile when you’re not sure what’s going on. Smile when someone says something mildly annoying because the customer is “always right.”

So I tried. I started practicing in the mirror and on Zoom recordings. What I saw was alarming. My smile looked forced, twitchy—like I was grimacing through dental pain. Worse, my mouth muscles started to ache after five minutes, like I’d just finished a workout I never signed up for.

Then came the speaking issues. I can’t pronounce half the words I need to say while smiling. My tongue keeps getting in the way. I stumble. I sound insincere and weirdly robotic. I even bit my tongue during a presentation last week—mid-sentence, on camera, in front of our regional manager.

I know this sounds like a small thing, but it’s got me questioning everything. How did I lose something so human, so basic? Why does it feel so fake now when I try to get it back?

Part of me feels like I’m performing an emotion I no longer feel naturally. Another part wonders if this is what burnout looks like when it sneaks in quietly—bit by bit, year after year, until one day you realize your smile has gone missing.

I don’t have a neat ending for this. Just a jaw that aches from faking joy and a sincere desire to reconnect with whatever part of me used to smile without thinking. Maybe it’s still in there, buried under the layers of adulthood, stress, and forced professionalism. Maybe I just need to remember how to feel it again—genuinely. Not because it’s expected, but because I want to.