Where did the children go?
Part II
Part II of my first ever story. I'm so used to writing poetry I admit writing an actual story is definitely different so bare with me. I'll eventually get to the point.. LOL! 😂🤣
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“This is Racheal,” I heard on the other end of the line. Oh, nice! She sounded friendly, I thought! I introduced myself and asked about setting up an appointment. She replied, “Sure! Let me check my schedule.” So far, so good... A moment later, she came back and said she had an opening next Tuesday at 6:00 PM. I booked it and thanked her.
But then that little voice in my head started trying to talk me out of it. Wow, that was quick! I pushed it aside, reminding myself why I needed to see someone. The anger. Yes, the ANGER of the Irish! “Cut it out!” I could almost hear my roommate Jennifer saying, followed by, “Stop blaming your heritage! You’re angry for a reason, and it’s not just because of where you come from.” Jennifer had been my roommate for almost 14 years. She was straightforward, to say the least. No, she was downright BLUNT. But she cared, and she had always been my biggest supporter.
A whole week until the appointment... Alright.
I spent a lot of time wondering what I would say to this Racheal person. Honestly, I didn’t even know where to begin. I had no clear idea why I felt so angry inside. Not that I didn’t have plenty of reasons. My parents passed away before I turned 13. My brother, who was supposed to look out for me and help me grow up, totally dropped the ball! And then there were all those failed relationships. Either I was “too much” or not enough. It always felt like it was my fault. I got tired of overthinking everything and spent most of the days leading up to my appointment either napping or playing games on my phone and laptop, depending on what I was into at the moment.
"Take that, you rat bastard!" I yelled at the screen. I had been hooked on this online RPG since 1999, and here we were in 2017. The game? Asheron's Call. It started as a Sierra multiplayer RPG and was recently snatched up by Disney. Even though the monthly fee had gone up a bit, it still felt just like the old days. I was playing alongside friends I had known for years, all scattered across different states, and honestly, I liked it that way.
Finally, Tuesday rolled around...
I showed up 15 minutes early and parked my Jeep, just sitting there, feeling a mix of anticipation and dread. I’ll admit, I’m not great with new people. I get all nervous and tongue-tied. But the moment had arrived. It was either go inside or drive off, and bailing didn’t seem like a smart move. I was already there, and I figured she’d charge me whether I showed up or not. I rolled my eyes and shook my head, trying to shake off the negativity.
After a few minutes in the waiting room, she stepped out and said, “Sam? You ready?” She had a lovely smile and seemed really chill. I followed her into her office, which was a quirky mix of modern and classic American furniture. There was a couch (of course), a chair, and a desk with a printer on it. She had sent me some forms to fill out beforehand, probably printed on that very machine. My thoughts wandered until she asked, “Sam, would you like a bottled water?” I snapped back to reality and declined, still feeling the nerves bubbling up!
“So, what brings you in to see me?” she asked.
I started sharing with her how I was always filled with anger. I talked about how I pushed my friends away and was always getting into fights with my roommates, feeling like I just couldn’t manage it all. She asked the obvious next question: what was making me so angry? My first instinct and what I ended up replying was to say, “I really don’t know.” So, she rephrased it, asking, “What makes you angry?” I tried to brush it off with some jokes—traffic jams, the smell of coffee (since I can’t stand it), animal abuse... She quickly jumped in, asking, “Do you see a lot of animal abuse?” She looked genuinely concerned. “Uh, no, not really. I just can’t stand it when animals are mistreated.” Then she wanted to know about my childhood. I told her my mom spoiled us rotten. We went on trips, like our last one to Disneyland and Hollywood, where I got to see Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Barbara Streisand's footprints and even Carol Burnett's dressing room at Universal Studios. I chuckled about how they had a floating Alfred Hitchcock in a pool, like he’d been murdered. Looking back, that was a weird thing to find funny... maybe it was one of those “you had to be there” moments. I just shrugged it off in my mind.
Then she asked about my parents...
I bit my lip, aware of it. I wondered if she noticed.
I told the same old story I’d repeated countless times before. My parents divorced when I was just a baby. My dad was a veteran with serious mental health struggles. He was around for two of my three brothers but not much for me and my brother Mark since we were younger, just three years apart. I mentioned that my dad passed away when I was nine but didn’t go into details about how. It didn’t really matter to me. I could tell she noticed how much I loved my mom when I talked about her passing from cancer when I was twelve. I reminisced about a summer trip we took from Texas to California, hitting Vegas and Nevada along the way. I mentioned how going to Disneyland was a big deal. That summer before she passed away, I talked about how she really spoiled us. She asked if I realized my mom was dying back then. I had to pause and think because I honestly didn’t, but it hit me that maybe she knew and wanted to shower us with love before she left. I shared with her how our neighbors came over to break the news about my mom being sick and that she was going to “be with God in Heaven.” As I recounted that moment, I felt this wave of anger rise up in me. She reassured me that feeling angry was totally okay and valid. I told her that “if I had known, I could have treated my mom so much better—been a better daughter, something,..”
She replied, “And she probably knew that, don’t you think?”
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Continued in Part III (don't give up on my story yet, y'all.......)
Read Part I and Part III
About the Creator
ᔕᗩᗰ ᕼᗩᖇTY
Sam Harty is a poet of raw truth and quiet rebellion. Author of Lost Love Volumes I & II and The Lost Little Series, her work confronts heartbreak, trauma, and survival with fierce honesty and lyrical depth. Where to find me
Why Smiling Can Feel Like the Hardest Thing
The Unbearable Weight of a Smile: When Your Face Refuses to Lie Anymore "Just smile," they said, as if my face were a light switch I could simply flip. As if the muscles required to curve my lips upward hadn't become so heavy that lifting them felt like deadlifting my own despair. As if smiling—the simplest, most automatic human expression—hadn't become the most exhausting performance of my entire day. I'm standing in line at the coffee shop, and the barista is making small talk. "How's your day going?" she asks, cheerful, genuine, expecting the standard response. My jaw tenses. My face feels like stone. I know what I'm supposed to do—smile, say "great, how about you?", participate in this basic social ritual that I've performed thousands of times without thinking. But I can't. My face won't cooperate. The muscles required to form a smile feel paralyzed, or more accurately, weighted down by something too heavy to lift. I force it anyway. The corners of my mouth move upward mechanically, but it doesn't reach my eyes. It doesn't feel genuine. It feels like I'm wearing a mask that doesn't quite fit. "Fine, thanks," I manage, and the barista's smile falters slightly. She can tell. Something's off. My smile is wrong somehow—too tight, too forced, too obviously fake. I take my coffee and leave quickly, exhausted by the thirty-second interaction. My face hurts from the effort of that brief, failed smile. And I still have an entire day of this ahead of me. When Your Face Becomes a Traitor I used to smile easily, automatically. It was a reflex, an unconscious response to humor, kindness, joy, social situations. I never thought about it, never had to try. Now every smile is manual labor. Every upward curve of my lips requires conscious effort, deliberate muscle activation, sustained energy I don't have. My face has become resistant, like it knows I'm lying and refuses to participate in the deception. In meetings at work, I'd notice other people smiling, laughing, their faces animated and expressive. And I'd try to match them, to mirror their expressions, to look like I was engaged and present. But my face wouldn't cooperate. It would freeze in this neutral, flat expression that read as either bored or angry, even though I wasn't trying to look either way. I just... couldn't make my face do what faces are supposed to do. "You look upset," my boss said after one meeting. "Is everything okay?" "I'm fine," I said, and tried to smile to prove it. But even I could feel how wrong it looked—this grimace that pretended to be a smile, this contortion that fooled no one. "If something's bothering you, you can talk to me," he pressed. Nothing was bothering me. At least, nothing specific. I wasn't angry or upset about work. I was just... unable to smile. Unable to make my face perform the basic signals that tell others I'm okay, I'm engaged, I'm a functioning human being having a normal interaction. The Exhaustion of Performance Every day became a marathon of forced facial expressions. Wake up. Try to smile at my partner over breakfast. Fail. See his concern. Force a smile to reassure him. Feel my face muscles strain with the effort. Get to work. Try to look pleasant and approachable. Feel my face settle into that blank, heavy expression despite my best efforts. Force periodic smiles during conversations. Feel exhausted by 10 AM from the sheer effort of manipulating my own face. Lunch with colleagues. They're laughing about something. I hear the joke, understand it's funny, know I should be laughing too. Try to make my face do the laughing expression. Produce something that's almost a smile but not quite right. See them notice. Feel them pull back slightly, unsure how to read me. By the end of each day, my face would actually ache. Not from overuse, but from the constant tension of trying to force expressions that wouldn't come naturally, of fighting against muscles that wanted to remain flat and unresponsive. I started avoiding situations that required me to smile. Stopped going to social gatherings where I'd have to perform happiness I didn't feel. Turned down invitations to celebrations, parties, events where smiling would be expected and my inability to do so would be conspicuous. My world shrank to environments where I didn't have to pretend—mostly my apartment, alone, where my face could rest in its natural state of heavy neutrality without judgment or concern. Understanding the Impossibility "Why can't I smile?" I asked my therapist, genuinely baffled by this loss of what seemed like the most basic human function. "I'm not trying to look miserable. I just... can't make my face do it anymore." She explained it in a way that finally made sense. "Depression doesn't just affect your mood—it affects your motor functions, including the facial muscles. The neurotransmitters that allow for spontaneous emotional expression are depleted. Your face isn't refusing to smile. Your brain isn't sending the signals that create smiling." She showed me research about something called "facial feedback"—the way our facial expressions both reflect and influence our emotional state. When you smile, your brain registers that feedback and generates corresponding positive emotions. It's a two-way street. But in depression, that street is blocked. Your brain can't generate the positive emotions that produce genuine smiles, and forcing smiles doesn't trick your brain into feeling better—it just exhausts you with the effort of manually operating machinery that's supposed to be automatic. "It's not laziness," she emphasized. "It's not attitude. It's a literal neurological impairment. Your brain has lost the ability to generate spontaneous positive facial expressions." Knowing this didn't make it easier, but it helped me understand why something so simple had become so impossibly hard. The Social Cost The inability to smile carries a staggering social cost that people who've never experienced it can't understand. Humans are wired to read faces. We make split-second judgments about people based on their expressions. A lack of smiling reads as unfriendly, unapproachable, angry, or unstable—even when that's not what you're feeling at all. My relationships deteriorated. Friends stopped reaching out because interactions with me felt flat, heavy, unrewarding. I wasn't fun to be around anymore. Not because I was actively negative, but because I couldn't reflect back the warmth and positive energy that social bonds require. My partner grew increasingly frustrated. "You never seem happy to see me," he said one night. "I come home and you just... look at me. No smile, no warmth, nothing." "I am happy to see you," I insisted. "I just can't make my face show it." "That doesn't make sense," he said, hurt and confused. "If you're happy, why can't you smile?" How could I explain that happiness and smiling had become disconnected? That I could feel some small sense of gladness that he was home, but that feeling couldn't translate into facial expression? That the pathway between emotion and face had been severed? I couldn't explain it in a way that made sense to him. And eventually, he stopped believing I was happy to see him at all. The Judgment and Misunderstanding The worst part was the constant judgment from people who didn't understand. "You should smile more!" Random strangers, usually men, felt entitled to offer this advice, as if my face existed for their viewing pleasure. "Cheer up, it might never happen!" People would joke, assuming my expression meant something bad had occurred, when really it just meant my face was resting in its default depressed state. "Why are you so angry?" I wasn't angry. I was just unable to smile. "You need to work on your attitude." My attitude was fine. My face just couldn't show it. People assumed my lack of smiling meant I was rude, unfriendly, hostile, or miserable. They couldn't see that I was simply exhausted from trying to operate machinery that had stopped working. Even well-meaning people hurt me with their attempts to help. "Just fake it till you make it!" they'd say. "Force yourself to smile and you'll feel better!" But forcing smiles didn't make me feel better. It made me feel like a fraud. It highlighted the gap between what my face was doing and what I was actually feeling. It made the depression more obvious, not less, because the smile never reached my eyes, never looked genuine, never fooled anyone including me. The Breaking Point The crisis came during my niece's birthday party. She was turning five, excited, adorable, having the time of her life. She ran up to me with a drawing she'd made, her face lit up with pure childhood joy. "Look what I made for you, Auntie!" I looked at the drawing—a colorful, enthusiastic rendering of the two of us holding hands. She'd drawn me with a big smile. And I couldn't smile back at her. I tried. God, I tried. This innocent child showing me something she'd made with love, and I couldn't produce even a small smile of acknowledgment. My face remained flat. Heavy. Unresponsive. Her face fell. "Don't you like it?" "I love it, sweetheart," I said, my voice breaking slightly. "It's beautiful." But she'd already seen my expression—or lack of it. She walked away, confused and a little hurt, and I stood there holding her drawing, hating myself for not being able to give this child the one simple thing she wanted: a smile. That night, I called my psychiatrist. "Something's really wrong," I said. "I can't even smile at a five-year-old. What's happening to me?" The Medical Reality My psychiatrist adjusted my medication and explained what was happening. "What you're experiencing is called 'psychomotor retardation'—a slowing down of physical and emotional responses. It's a core symptom of major depression. Your facial muscles aren't responding normally because the neural pathways that control spontaneous expression aren't functioning properly." She also mentioned something called "anhedonia"—the inability to feel pleasure—which often comes with an inability to express pleasure, even when you're trying. "The medication we're adjusting should help," she said. "But it takes time. Six to eight weeks, possibly longer, before you notice a difference." She also recommended something unexpected: facial exercises. "Research shows that deliberately practicing facial movements—even without the corresponding emotion—can help retrain the neural pathways. It won't cure the depression, but it might make the physical expressions easier." So I started doing these bizarre exercises. Standing in front of the mirror, manually moving my face through expressions. Lifting the corners of my mouth with my fingers to simulate a smile. Holding it. Releasing. Repeating. It felt ridiculous. I felt ridiculous. But I was desperate enough to try anything. The Slow Return The medication took seven weeks to start working. Seven weeks of forced smiles, exhausted facial muscles, and social situations I couldn't navigate properly. Then one morning, my partner said something funny at breakfast and I felt it—a real smile, spontaneous and genuine, breaking across my face without effort. It lasted maybe three seconds before fading. But it was real. It was mine. It happened without me having to manually operate my face. I started crying, which alarmed my partner until I explained: "I just smiled. A real smile. I didn't have to force it." He looked at me with such relief and sadness. "I didn't realize how hard it's been for you," he said quietly. After that, smiles came more frequently. Not all the time—I still had days where my face felt weighted and unresponsive. But the genuine smiles started outnumbering the forced ones. The effort required diminished. My face started cooperating again. Living With the Memory A year later, I can smile relatively easily again. Not effortlessly like I used to, and not constantly. But the heavy impossibility has lifted. My face has mostly remembered how to express what I'm feeling without requiring manual operation. But I haven't forgotten what it was like. That period when smiling felt harder than anything else, when my face betrayed me every day, when the simplest human expression became impossible. I'm gentler with people now. When I see someone with a flat expression, with a face that doesn't smile easily, I don't assume they're unfriendly or angry or rude. I wonder if maybe they're fighting this same battle. If maybe their face is as heavy as mine once was. I also don't take smiling for granted anymore. Every genuine smile feels like a gift, like evidence that my brain is working properly again, that the neural pathways are transmitting signals the way they should. The Truth That Needs Telling If you can't smile right now—if your face feels like dead weight, if forcing expressions exhausts you, if people keep telling you to cheer up and you want to scream that you're trying but your face won't cooperate—please know this: You're not broken. Your face isn't defective. This is a symptom of depression as real and valid as any other symptom. Your brain's ability to generate spontaneous positive expressions has been impaired by depleted neurotransmitters and disrupted neural pathways. This isn't attitude. This isn't choice. This is neurology. And it's treatable. With the right medication, therapy, and time, your face can remember how to smile again. The heaviness can lift. The effort can diminish. The genuine smiles can return. Don't let people shame you for something you literally cannot control. Don't let them tell you to "just smile" as if you haven't been trying. Don't let them mistake your depression for rudeness or hostility. Your face will cooperate again. The pathways will reconnect. The expressions will come naturally once more. Until then, be patient with yourself. You're not failing at something easy. You're managing something impossibly hard. And you're doing better than you think. When smiling becomes the hardest thing, it's not because you're ungrateful or negative or refusing to see the bright side—it's because depression has literally disconnected the neural pathways between emotion and facial expression. Your face isn't betraying you out of spite. It's malfunctioning because your brain chemistry is disrupted. The effort it takes you to produce a smile is the same effort it would take someone else to deadlift a car. You're not being difficult. You're being incredibly strong, showing up to social situations and manually operating facial machinery that's supposed to be automatic. The heaviness will lift. Your face will remember. Until then, please stop judging yourself for not being able to do something your broken neurology has made nearly impossible. --------------------------------------------- Thanks for Reading!
By Ameer Moavia7 days ago in Psyche
Comments (5)
I like to be slowly carried along, so I don’t mind at all 🥰 This Rachel lady is good at what she does, she asked all the right questions. I like reading about your childhood and how you liked to play Asheron's Call. I love that you included dialogue, the voice in your head and introduced us to Jennifer. I liked the fact that she was introduced using lines she would say to you. Her character is a captivating one, so is Rachel, so I am always looking forward to come back to this series. Below is a link to where I shared this story with my little apology in it for taking so long to get back to reading it. https://shopping-feedback.today/resources/raise-your-voice-thread-11-14-2024%3C/span%3E%3C/span%3E%3C/span%3E%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E%3C/div%3E%3C/div%3E%3C/div%3E%3Cstyle data-emotion-css="w4qknv-Replies">.css-w4qknv-Replies{display:grid;gap:1.5rem;}
cant go a day without reading your story👌
Sam, this was outstanding. The detail, dialog, and character development are very well done. Keep up the great work. I will be reading Part One and will look forward to Part Three.
You're doing well writing this and your first story, I'll be waiting for part 3!!!
Thanks for sharing your personal journey. Will catch up with Part 3.