What it actually means to be told you look unapproachable, and everything I’ve learned about living with the face I was given.
“Warmth builds trust instantly and without effort, and that's not a currency I have on hand in the same supply.
What I have instead is a face that makes people work a little harder to get to the parts of me that are actually true.”
For most of my life, people have decided who I am before I've said a word. It happens in a glance, someone sizing up my facial expression while I'm ordering coffee or walking past them on the sidewalk, and something in my face tells them I am not to be approached. People call it “resting bitch face.” I've never liked the term, mostly because it implies an attitude I don't actually have. My face at rest is just serious. It doesn't fall into friendliness on its own, and for a long time I resented it, the way you resent an old habit you can't shake, one that keeps determining how people treat you long after you've stopped thinking about where it came from.
My dad has the same face, and he's spent his whole adult life managing it. He's told me, more than once, that I get it from him, and that he's had to learn, actively and on purpose, to counteract it: smile at people in the hallway, soften his expression before walking into a room, put on a warmth that doesn't show up by default. I always found this a little funny, because anyone who actually knows my dad would tell you he's one of the kindest, goofiest, most generous people they've ever met. He has big dad energy in every sense. He's the dorky dad at home who tells the same jokes over and over again completely in earnest. And yet at work, I've watched him become someone else entirely: composed, serious, carrying an executive presence that makes a room straighten up. He's told me this shift is deliberate, something he's had to learn through years of feedback, because leadership requires a level of face management that naturally warm people never have to think about.
I inherited more than his features. I inherited the whole lifelong project.
Growing up, I was told constantly that I looked mean, or intimidating, or upset, when I felt none of those things. In high school, this turned into something more corrosive: people made assumptions about me before they knew anything true, and I started to believe those assumptions were fair. At my core, I find almost everything funny, and humor is honestly my favorite way of communicating with people. But a joke lands differently coming from a face that isn't already smiling, and I learned that my sense of humor, combined with my very New England bluntness, can read as harsh even when I mean things with real affection. I say what's on my mind. I still do. I'm a bit unfiltered, and sometimes it’s a good thing and sometimes it isn't. My resting face never helped the case - not once - it just sat there, undercutting whatever warmth I intended.
For a long time, my response to all of this was stubbornness. I remember thinking, with real conviction, that it wasn't fair to expect me to put in extra work just because my face happened to be less approachable than someone else's. Why should I have to smile first, or perform some version of friendliness I didn't feel, just to make other people comfortable? I wasn't mean. I was never intentionally unkind to anyone. I just didn't see why I should have to compensate for a face I didn't choose, so I mostly didn't. I let myself exist as I was and figured that was fair enough. It wasn't closed off, exactly. It was closer to a principle, one I held onto for longer than it actually served me.
This tendency followed me into sports, too, where I spent years being told to “lighten up” and “not be so intense” when, in truth, I was just focused. I had a coach in college who would regularly pull me aside mid-game to tell me to take a deep breath, convinced my expression meant I was unraveling emotionally. I wasn't tense. I wasn't upset. I was concentrating, and my face, without my permission, told a different story. Being corrected for an emotional state I didn't have got old fast. It wasn't emotionally driven. It was literally just my face.
What I've come to understand, slowly and without much grace, is that this is a trade, not just a flaw. The same face that made me feel unapproachable as a teenager has become something closer to a shield as an adult. Walking home alone at night in a city, I've never once worried that a stranger might read me as an easy target or an open invitation to talk. People don't test my boundaries, largely because my face already announced that I have some. This part isn't nothing. It's protective, and I've learned to actually appreciate it instead of apologizing for it.
The real cost, in reality, is trust. Warmth builds trust instantly and without effort, and that's not a currency I have on hand in the same supply. What I have instead is a face that makes people work a little harder to get to the parts of me that are actually true, which means the people who stick around are choosing me twice: once on the surface, and once for real. I've made peace with the fact that I can't fix this through effort alone. There's no plastic surgery or injection that makes your face friendlier. There's no expression you can practice your way into that rewrites what your features do by default. You can learn to compensate, the way my dad did, layering friendliness on top like something you put on before you leave the house. But underneath, the face is still exactly what it was.
What took me longer to accept was that layering on the friendliness, even knowing it wouldn't change what was underneath, actually mattered. I started noticing that walking into a coffee shop and making eye contact first, saying something friendly before anyone said it to me, altered the entire interaction that followed. It sounds almost too simple to be worth stating, but being the one to lead with warmth, rather than waiting to be read as warm, changed how easily I connected with people. New friendships came together faster. Existing ones got sturdier, too. None of this required me to become a different person. I love people. I love humor. Connecting with someone genuinely energizes me, which made it all the more absurd that I had spent years resisting the one small adjustment that would have made those connections easier to reach.
I'm aware that all of this makes me sound a little like a reformed con artist explaining how she learned to fake sincerity for personal gain, and I promise that's not the moral of the story, even if it reads that way on paper. I didn't learn to smile so I could manipulate baristas into liking me. I learned that the version of warmth I already felt on the inside was getting lost somewhere between my brain and my face, and that fixing the delivery system was worth the effort.
So I've stopped waiting for people to see past my face and started meeting them halfway instead. I know who I am underneath the expression, and so does everyone who's actually taken the time to know me. That doesn't erase the friction of being misread by strangers, and it doesn't make the extra effort any smaller. But I've come around, finally, to my dad's way of thinking: my face is still my face, but a little warmth on top of it goes further than I ever gave it credit for. Some people get handed an easy face. I got handed a complicated one. These days, I put in the extra mile, and I've watched, every time, how much it's worth it.
