Although constantly wearing a smile that suggests happiness, joy, agreeableness to a plan, and/or acknowledgment of a joke, Smiley Emoji recently came out acknowledging a range of complex emotions, including depression.
“Not to come off like a victim, but I think it’s fair to say I’ve been pigeonholed,” said Smiley. “People make a lot of assumptions about what I’m thinking and feeling, but almost no one seems interested in digging deeper below the surface. Honestly, it hurts.”
Smiley acknowledged his own part in setting up what he now realizes were unrealistic expectations of what people want and desire from him. “For a long time, I did just paste on that smile and show up, anywhere and everywhere - sometimes with punctuation, sometimes without, or sometimes I even made up the entire content of a message. Talk about pressure to bring a vibe.”
By wearing that classic, feel-good smile all the time, without deviation in his emotional affect, Smiley unknowingly set himself up for being presumed and even demanded to be happy all the time. “I’m a generally cheerful sort, but not without nuance or ebbs and flows.”
As he tells it, the more Smiley felt compelled to hide those ebbs and flows and suppress anything other than a pure Pollyanna-style grin, the more his darker and less appealing emotions began to fester inside him, to the extent that he has felt a well of depression, tinged with anger, welling up inside him for some time now.
The question, of course, is what he’s going to do about it.
“The first step, of course, was just naming it and talking about it publicly, as I’m doing right here,. In fact,’ he added with that signature smile, “I feel better already.”
That saic, Smiley expressed hope that, going forward, people take a moment to really look at him when he shows up on their phone or other electronic devices and think about what else he might be feeling beneath the upwardly curved black line that represents his mouth.
“Just to be noticed and considered is all I’m asking,” he said. “I think that’s fair.”
