Celebrating world smile day was a self-revelatory experience. 

I consider myself a pleasant person, friendly even. And according to the personality quiz I took online I am "naturally social," despite being an introvert (learn about your personality here).

However, it turns out I am not as smiley as I thought.

Today my goal was to smile at absolutely every person: people I walked past, grocery store workers, people driving by in cars, all of them. I didn't think it would be too hard. I just thought it would be a matter of choosing not to pick out a new song on my ipod as I walked past other persons. I was wrong. 

It was unnatural and near to awkward roughly 57%* of the time. Now, I'm willing to admit that at least 14% of these encounters were awkward due to the fact that I have become a social hermit because that I have been living in my parents' basement and the only time I even see a human my age is when I hang out with my engaged amigos (not even exaggerating here). Therefore, the introvert inside me has reclaimed her territory making me 78% more socially incapable. However, this 14% that's a result of my social hermitation does not account for the other 43% of awkward smiling interactions. What I have to conclude is, I don't naturally smile at people as much as I think I do. 

Which is a sad thought to me. It's sad because I genuinely (but possibly naively) think that it makes other people's day just a bit better (probably a 3% improvement). At any rate, Everyone smiled back. Some even added a "hello."  What I definitely know is that smiling at other people makes my day better. Who knew that that study that said if you smile you will feel better was actually true? Maybe it tricked me into being happy or thinking that I had more friends or to think I was confident (turns out, when I see a hot guy I usually peek at him but quickly avert my unworthy eyes from his hotness-a practice that was against the rules today). 

The moral of the story is that, I'm going to work on smiling at people more. 

Hopefully, I will eventually celebrate World Smile Day every day.

* please note that all percentages presented in this piece are estimations as I like the idea of quantifiable evidence more than I like actually quantifying evidence