I am a smiley guy. Most people find that fact hard to deny. However, this was not always the case. I actually started to force a smile on intentionally so as not to stress out students who thought I was always frowning at them, or worse, that my twitchy Tourette’s-related facial contortions were somehow meant for them. To my surprise, by smiling on the outside, I slowly became to smile on the inside as well. Whereas I had once been a terribly serious snob who was far too cool to enjoy much in life, I suddenly became more open-minded, relaxed, even downright silly. This new grin-forward, happy-go-lucky Craig was also less self-aware, much more in the moment. It felt like that simple attempt at a facial intervention produced remarkably profound ripple effects that, as anyone can see, have stuck. It was an unintentional but life-altering pivot into a better me.

When I started writing this piece, I was clearly not smiling on the inside. Early drafts were merely page after page of black tormented seas roiling with bile, anger, disillusionment, and spite. Every bitter vitriolic word was spat out from within the deepest pits of depression and despair. There was no reason to smile then, even though I still did.

However, after some time, tiny hints of light began to flicker within the shadows. My beleaguered self could hardly believe it either. I’d coasted past those seas of grief, over its confluence of coping mechanisms and salubrious self-care into the peaceful placid bays of acceptance. I was once again smiling on the inside.

I am grateful and relieved to have reached the end of that voyage, which was a confusing and challenging period I’m glad to be done with. But talking about it helps, writing about it helps, and hopefully, hearing about it might help too. So thank you in advance for taking time to listen to my journey. It’s a bit funny, a bit silly, and at times, a bit scary, but I promise that at the end, we’ll all be smiling. Inside and out.

Craig Ringrose

(I recommend you listen to these tracks with headphones.)

When I got married
I smiled so much I had to stop
I almost pulled a grin muscle
In fact
There are 2 pictures of it
One of me looking like the happiest puppy at the dog park
The second like I am repulsed by some raunchy smell has pervaded that sacred space
A twitchy person like me
Tends to have more of the latter type of faces
Regardless of how I am feeling on the inside
But as a twitchy teacher
That adds an extra layer of complications to most situations
Students see a cycle of my elastic grimaces
And might assume I’m upset when really I’m overjoyed
It’s just tough to tell the difference sometimes
Looking only at my face
To counter this
I started smiling
All the time
Made a broad grin my default
No more resting sad face
And confirming the wisdom of mothers everywhere
I made that face for so long
It DID stick
Now I’ve got a bit of smirk plastered on
Permanently
And what was quite shocking
For me
A person without a lot of problems
Living my best life
For me
Smiling on the outside
Has led to smiling on the inside
I’ve become the happier and more content version of myself
Without really even intending it

And so
Clearly for me now
Having gotten a bit of rough news
I’ve responded by coping with those losses in ways
That probably should not have
A big smile plastered on
And yet
There it is
Most of the time
This new tear-streaked grim-faced paradigm
Takes some getting used to
In ways my body needs to adjust to
Inside and out

The one that tries so hard to be happy
Now just feels so sad
Regardless of the face I might be making
My face looks happy
But I’m not.
Not always.

But despite
This new heaviness
These new shadows and frowns
I’m doing okay
Most days shockingly so

I feel this myself and wonder
When traversing these seas of sorrow
Past inlets of grief rife with potential disasters lurking about
Hidden traumas and sneaky despairs that might
Upend my boat at any time
Why do I always
Navigate those emotional rapids with
Nary a scratch?
Why am I doing so well?
It isn’t just my face
Inside too
I feel like I must have cheated somehow
Snuck at peek at the owner’s manual for this
God. Damn. Ship of woes
And somehow learned how to redirect it from its ill-omened fate.

How else to explain it?
Having never before held my hand to a tiller
Or stretched my fingers round an oar,
Yet from the first moment, each movement felt practiced and assured,
Like the learned experiences of a thousand lifetimes is
Guiding my strokes,
Setting the course,
And providing solace within the blackest loneliest nights.
With a heart of lightness,
Eyes on the horizon,
This is how I go.

My face looks happy
And I am.

It hasn’t always been this easy.
Like any athlete
It takes practice
More for me and my lack of body awareness.
I had to learn the hard way
Tossed into bays of depression and anxiety
Laden with heavy clothes and heavy thoughts
And forced to find an escape
To figure out which star to follow in a confounding galaxy of
Coping mechanism constellations
And contradictory maps of mental health strategies.

But somehow I made it
Sucked down to watery hell and back again
Through misery and joy
Terror and euphoria
I made it
How did I do it?
Hard to put into words.
But I’ll do my best.

Long before it was a given that
My emotional instincts were in fact reliable and healthy
Where if I followed the route my guts said to
Everything seemed to turn out alright

As I journeyed up the coast of life,
I’d come close to disaster at times.
Trying to discern
Red herrings from rainbow trout
Red flags from green lights
Red tides from blue waters
Choices made all the more harrowing by the colorblindness
Which strickened not just my eyes
But my thoughts as well
Stuck so deep in the groove of my red-green blues
Left me unable to pinpoint just which hues to heed,
Which shades to be afraid of
When I’d dropped my map in the water
Again
Or bang my head with my paddle
Again
Are those signs to be mindful of?
Twitches of truth betraying fearful genetic shallows roiling with unseen catastrophes?
Or has the voice in my head
Merely been in the sun too long?

I’d adjust my compass for “Too Early to Tell”
And found the waters rather gentle and inviting.

But as days blurred to years
The route began
To narrow
The storms began
To harrow
Far
Far
Far worse
Than anything I’d overcome yet.

At first I’d followed the mantra
Deny, deny, and carry on,
Deny, deny, and carry on,
Deny, deny and dammit carry on
With no reason to believe it wasn’t true.
But as that route became
Every day a danger
And every day a doubt
Every day felt stranger
With every day a bout of
Crushing maniacal helplessness paired with
Heaving shallow-breathed fits of mournful anxiety
Impossible not to see
Impossible not to know
Impossible not to admit
What truth had been inside me all along.

I’d started that trip
My first solo voyage
With such a clear idea of what to do, where to go,
What to fear and what to dismiss
But now, I see this for what it is,
A fool’s errand not captained by those twins, Wisdom and Insight, or even Luck and Perseverance, but instead
I’d been bamboozled by that damned trio of Dee, En, and A.
Such malevolent leviathans had been in charge
Since the start.
Every stroke
Every choice
Every course correction
Was not
As I thought
My own brilliance on display
But rather
Their twisted influence on
Everything.

As I began to unravel all the implications and ramifications,
I was gutted by just how stupid I’d been
I puked my guts out
Considered cutting my guts out
Giving up right then and there
For I had
COME
SO
FAR
In
The Wrong….
…direction.

Who knew
Where to go now?
Who to trust
If not myself?

And so now
My mind awash in crimson
It felt time to reexamine my headings
Before losing my head entirely.

I’d been certain that the journey would be
Packed with good times on the high seas
A sense that the wildest adventures surely still lay ahead
But now
With each dip of the oar into these bitter waters
Surfaced a bleak retinue of companions to co-opt my vessel
Numbness
Depression
Disillusionment
Anger
All aboard on a journey now hardly worth salvaging.

There seemed to be no answer that might
Settle the storm within me,
And so with nowhere to go but onward
Perilous and fraught that might be
I had to face these hijackers head on
Come to terms with these blackest of thoughts
Before they threw me overboard.

I relate this tale so casually
For there is safety in sharing from a bit of a distance
But then
In the midst of all this
Fiery upheaval
It was a tortuous ordeal

I fancied myself a storyteller
But it became painfully obvious
My story was being told
And it
is
Fucking
Dark
No sit-com
A horrific cautionary tale
Getting pursued by Nameless beasts
Backed into corners
Hackles raised
All claws and teeth
Naked and battered
Pushed to the absolute limit
I was in one of those movies
Based on a true story
But it was my story
It was my fucking story
That drove that dastardly plot
That was all I had
To learn from
To live with
And to get over
And that is a rough fucking ride let me tell you

I often feel
So damned principled
So put together
So steady at the wheel
So sure of where I am and where I’m headed
But why do I always have to be the adult in the room?
Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so principled
So mature
But that’s not really true either
I wish that I wish that, but honestly
I like my principles
I stick to them for a reason
It just means that
So much of what I want to say
so much of what I want to write has been self-censored
All questionable or unseemly details scrubbed from the records
To craft a carefully curated image in the name of posterity
A bit of selfish self-editing to ensure that if in fact I were to one day
To not return
To point my kayak at the horizon and see how far I make it
That you’d remember my principles
My legends
My myths
My self
My version
The one available already that I’ve left like crumbs
Songs from decades ago
Me and my spooky prescience,
Predicted my own future with haunting accuracy.
To me it’s been obvious the whole time
I always had a resonance in me
I’d look at her and think, yeah, we’re that same
We’re the same genetic colour
It wasn’t even that weird
It made grim perfect obvious sense
Thus the principles
Thus the crumbs
And thus the grief
But turns out
I was good at that too
I had previous experience on my resume for the Coping with Trauma Position
As a kid
I already felt handicapped
With Tourette’s and OCD
Weird twitchy noisy repetitive shit
I watched kids on TV that had it too
I thought they were so fucking weird
But in the end, I’m the King Weirdo!
My genes have all that
And a free simmering pot of mutinous neurons
Guaranteed to dissolve into a puddle of mush
Gradually enough you can feel the mushification
Slabs of sickening and muddy grey-matter
Atop the shit genetic sandwich.
I win!...
But it’s
The worst.
God. Damn.
Contest.

When I found out I had Tourettes,
I hated the testing
Sitting in weirdly dark
Creepy little offices with strangers
Asking me
If I wanted to kill myself
I said no
Now
That’s a much different question.
But so far
The answer has been remarkable similar.
Before I knew I had Tourettes
But not the fun kind!
I didn’t know why I was coughing and twitching
Evening-out
Poking things
Mostly just taking up so much SPACE in the world
So it gave me this overwhelming sense of relief and confidence
To know just what it was I had.
To me, naming it was a powerful superweapon allowing for specifically targeted countermeasures.
Now it’s the same
I have a new disease!
Definitely not the fun kind!
But that same sense of peace and acceptance
Filled me from head to toe.
For the first time in a long time,
I couldn’t stop smiling.

While I expected to feel terrible
For confirming the difference
For knowing the Names and best-before dates
And for being an overachiever
Even on the genetic tests
Now I feel fine
Most of the time
Writing about it like this
Being useful to science
These are all positive things that make me feel
Useful not ashamed
And I use my goddamn principles
To avoid depression
To avoid bucket-listing too much
To avoid missing out on the time I have left
And maybe that’s okay

That being said
Walking off the field
Retiring early
This metaphor means a lot now
It’s reduced the need to produce
To excel
To strive for anything
Because I’m pseudo-retired already
Then I remember
Tears welling up
I’m 34 goddamn years old
I’m in my prime
I should be getting started
I don’t want to be at my Death Expected already
I really don’t
That still hurts
That still stings
That’s a raw goddamn wound to overcome
And those hard facts
Once thought
Can’t be unthought
Or especially undone
I’ve peaked
And that fucking sucks
That’s why my practicum mattered so much
Because I knew it wasn’t the start
It was the end
It wasn’t a prep class
It was my final exam
I’m a great teacher
I really am
I really knew it
I really really really wanted other people to know it too
And now they do!
It’s been confirmed
My years of overachieving and reflecting
Studying and growing
Trying so hard
Me and my principles
We stuck the landing
Best practicum ever
All the superlatives I ever wanted and more
People talked about me and pointed
They had never seen anyone like me
Dedicated
Committed
Friendly
Smiling
All true but nice to hear out loud
I genuinely love teaching
And I proved it
Finished strong
Gold medal
Gold star
10/10
But that was it
It’s over now
I’m over now
And that really
Goddamn
Sucks.