Laughter- A Defence Mechanism

“You are not made for being sad at all,

Look at that smile, how beautiful it is.”

He said.

I was a very happy child always, even when I grew up, I was always happy and weird and perfectly okay with it.

My Mumma tells me how when I was a child I used to go to each house of our mohalla of our little village to eat in the morning, everybody loved me, I ate a lot and took every house as eating round and I never cried on anything, I was always happy.

I smile remembering it now because I really was happy and just in a few years everything disappeared, it wasn’t a long ago when I realized that my smile is not just a smile anymore but a reflex action to protect my heart from those harsh emotions or to not feel anything.

And I thought, fuck, I have been doing that for long, without even realizing.

And how low our happiness standards are as we take everybody who is laughing often as happy, everybody who is their authentic self and weird as happy(well maybe in this case some people are), everybody who is trying to pretend is happy.

It is not like you start walking on the road crying and start telling your story to people who don’t even care, that’s not how it should be and so that is not how it is.

There is this thing with me, I have a problem with sympathy and I have some real problem with sympathy that is faked when they say it out of habit and don’t mean it.

I have those words and feelings and every single thing about it since I was a child, so it's just easy to go around laughing and god, I’m so good at it that now it's so deeply engraved in my character.

Can you imagine laughing as a reflex action to pain, humiliation, stress, anxiety, and whatnot, I read it as a defense mechanism, and for me, it's working.