QUOTE : blinked back sudden tears and pasted a smile on my face. The smiles had gotten me through tough times. I’d read online that the physical act of smiling—even if you were unhappy—could improve your mood by tricking your brain into releasing happiness-inducing hormones. So I’d smiled all the time as a teenager, and people probably thought I was crazy, but it was better than sinking into a darkness so deep I might’ve never clawed my way out. And when smiling on my own became too hard, I looked for other reasons to be “happy” like the beauty of a rainbow after a storm, the sweet taste of a perfectly baked cookie, or gorgeous photographs of glittering cities and epic landscapes around the world. It had worked…for the most part.