When I smile my pain and brokenness
are easier to bear.
I am broken in ways both known and unknown to me.
Brokenness causes me pain on many levels: physical, emotional, familial, psychological, and/or spiritual.
Sometimes this brokenness threatens to overpower me, to take control of me.
Smiling lets me reclaim myself, lets me exert power over the pain and brokenness.
Smiling allows me to turn the tables as it were on the pain and brokenness, and once again take the reins of my life back, as opposed to letting pain of my brokenness control my life.
Smiling is my therapeutic antidote of choice for whatever life brings my way.
Naturally I want to consult with and use the tools of the medical community, yet if I do this with a frown rather than a smile, I undermine its potential benefit for me.
The world always looks brighter from behind a smile.