I used to be known for my smile. That sounds like a silly thing to say about yourself, but in my family it was almost my job. At weddings in Finglas, at christenings in packed parish halls, even behind the counter of the little café where I worked near Dublin city centre, people would say, “There she is now, lighting the place up.” I never thought much of it. A smile felt like something I owned without ever having to earn it.
Then, one wet Tuesday evening, I slipped coming down the steps outside a shop on Dame Street. It was not dramatic in the way films make accidents dramatic. No screeching cars, no crowd gasping. Just my boot sliding, my cheek hitting the edge of the step, and a hot white pain that made the whole street disappear. I damaged a nerve in my face. The swelling went down after a while, the bruises faded, but the left side of my mouth did not lift properly anymore.
The doctors were kind. They told me nerves are slow. They said months, maybe longer, maybe never fully. Everyone around me tried to be kind too, but kindness can sometimes arrive wearing heavy boots. “You can hardly notice it,” people said, which only made me notice it more. “Give us a smile,” an uncle said at Christmas, then went red when he saw me trying. I started keeping my mouth small in photographs. I avoided reflective windows on Grafton Street. I stopped laughing with my whole face because I was afraid people would see the wrongness of it.
For a few months, I became a smaller version of myself. I went to work, came home, watched the same comfort shows, and answered messages with thumbs-up emojis because words felt like too much. The strangest part was not that I could not smile properly. It was that people began reading me differently. Customers thought I was annoyed. A woman once told my manager I had “a face on me” when all I had done was hand her a cappuccino. On the bus, I caught myself wanting to explain to strangers, “I’m not unfriendly. I’m just injured.” But there is no polite way to announce your hidden wound every ten minutes.
The day things changed, I was sitting upstairs on the 46A, stuck in traffic near St Stephen’s Green. It was raining sideways, that fine Dublin rain that makes everyone look personally betrayed. Across the aisle was a young mother with a little boy, maybe four years old. He was having one of those exhausted cries that starts in the body before it becomes sound. His mother looked mortified. People were doing the usual thing, staring hard at their phones, pretending not to hear.
I knew that look on her face. Not because I had a child, but because I recognised the loneliness of being visible at the exact moment you want to disappear. I wanted to give her my old smile, the one that said, “You’re alright. Don’t mind anyone.” But I did not have it, not the way I used to. Still, when she glanced up, I lifted what I could. A crooked, half-working, nervous little smile.
For a second, she just looked at me. Then her shoulders dropped. She smiled back, tired and grateful, and mouthed, “Thank you.” Her little boy hiccupped himself quiet against her coat. Nothing grand happened. The traffic moved. Someone rang the bell. The bus sighed into the next stop. But I sat there feeling as if a door inside me had opened an inch.
After that, I began doing it deliberately. Not in a cheerful, forced way. I did not go around grinning like a fool. I just started
Note: Please be aware that these are written in confidentiality and there is not reference or mention of any real people and their sentiments here. Every incident and Story tends to be emotional so please read at your own emotional risk. Website is not responsible for anything related. HumansofDublin.io is not related to the photography project HumansofDublin by Peter Varga
