Take the laugh back

The companion page to this one is for the people who mock. This one is for you — the person who got mocked, and who has been laughing at half volume ever since.

One person told the whole arc in a few lines. An ex — an abusive one, their word — ruled the laugh weird, and the smile with it. So the laugh got stifled and the smile got hidden, for years, the way you babysit anything you’ve been told is embarrassing. And then, slowly and on purpose, they took both back. The sentence they came out with on the far side is the one worth keeping: pure expressions of joy were never the weird thing. The weirdness belonged entirely to the person who could look at delight and see material.

Two things in that account matter for yours.

The verdict said more about the judge than the laugh. People who ridicule how joy looks on you are telling you what they do with vulnerability when they see it — that’s all. An honest laugh is the least calculated thing a body does; calling it weird is like calling weather rude. This is doubly true when the critic was someone whose affection came bundled with corrections.

The un-stifling is active work, and it counts as real work. The flinch installed by one cruel sentence doesn’t dissolve on insight alone — the person here spent years at it. It loosens with practice in safe rooms: laughing alone until the sound stops startling you, then around the one friend who’d never bite, then outward. Every uncensored laugh is a rep. Progress is the snort you didn’t catch in time — and didn’t apologize for.

It helps to know what you’re reclaiming. Elsewhere in these conversations, a person still treasured a near-stranger’s compliment about their laugh years after one bad season — that’s the size of the thing. A laugh reaches people. Yours has been missed, possibly for years, by everyone who liked you before you started rationing it.

The laugh was never the problem. Take it back at whatever speed it comes — it remembers the way out.