Why the long face

Somebody came up to me and asked me “why the long face?”. Yes I have a gruff disposition. But that line came from a comedy where somebody asked a horse that question. Of course the horse can’t help having a long face. I suppose the assumption is that it would have been the same for me.

Actually it’s not true. When I was a teenager, I had 2 very miserable years where my life was crashing down all around me. Before that I was still relatively well adjusted, probably didn’t have too many friends and didn’t care for them. But I was the genius in the class and that probably made up for everything else. Then one day, came a large crisis in confidence, and that made my schoolwork go down. People around me thought that I was being my usual cocky self, so they decided to “bring me down to earth”. Needless to say, the effect was disastrous, it just made everything worse and started a vicious cycle. I spent 2 years being miserable.

I read somebody’s description of Princess Diana: when you see her up close, you find that her head is a little big in proportion to her body, as you might expect from somebody who’s been in the spotlight constantly for the better part of more than 10 years. I suppose external circumstances happen to shape the way you turn out. So for me, 2 of my formative years were completely miserable. At the beginning of those 2 years, I had a more squarish face. Not as long as now. At the end, I had a longer face. Thank goodness there were better days to come, but I’ve always believed that those 2 tough years in my early teenagehood were the cause of my long face.

Likewise I always had plenty of white hair. I think it came from studying, thinking and worrying too much. I still study and think a lot, but worry much less. There’s a lot that I worried about when I was younger, that I don’t really give a shit about anymore. The peak of my white hair was at the end of the first year in the uni. I think something changed in that second year of uni, and after that my hair slowly turned black again.