I Smiled for Two Days Straight and Accidentally Became the Neighbourhood's Most Suspicious Person

Here's what I'd noticed: when someone asks "how are you?", we mostly answer with a verbal shrug. Oh, you know. Tired. Busy. Surviving. And then we nod at each other, having successfully confirmed that being alive is a lot of work and neither of us wishes to elaborate.

Because — and I say this with love — nobody actually wants the download. Answer that polite little question with a four-minute report on your car's mysterious new noise and your neighbour's judgmental dog, and you can watch the light leave a person's eyes in real time. They asked out of habit. You handed them a monologue.

But.

And it's a glorious, magnificent but.

Walk around genuinely smiling — not the frozen caffeine grin, but a warm, I-know-something-you-don't smile — and suddenly everyone is desperately curious about you. Like you've strolled in holding a mysterious little box, and the whole room wants to know what's inside.

So naturally, I ran an experiment. I'm a writer. I treat life as research and I have a borderline-unhealthy need to test theories that ambush me at 2 a.m.

For two days, every single time someone asked how I was — neighbour, cashier, colleague, my dentist mid-cleaning (a conversation that should be legally prohibited) — instead of my usual "not bad, surviving," I beamed and said: "I'm having an AWESOME day!"

The first victim was someone who's asked me that roughly eight hundred times and received eight hundred flavours of "fine, thanks." This time they actually stopped walking. Mid-stride. Looked at me like I'd announced a new career in professional yodelling.

"You are?" they said, with the wary curiosity of someone checking whether I'd joined a cult.

"Absolutely," I said. And meant it.

And here's the magic — they wanted to know why. They leaned in. After years of pleasant, entirely forgettable exchanges, we had an actual conversation. A real one. Slightly unhinged. Completely wonderful.

It kept happening. The quiet cashier started chatting. The nod-and-move-on colleague lingered. My dentist had to pause the little mirror thing entirely, because you cannot conduct follow-up questions with your hands in someone's mouth. Even my cat looked mildly intrigued — and that animal has never cared about my emotional state unless it was five seconds past dinner.

Turns out an enthusiastic answer is basically a magic trick. People are so conditioned to expect a mediocre one that a good one short-circuits their brain for half a second. And in that half-second, the script drops. The autopilot clicks off. They actually look at you.

But here's the bit that got me. Say it enough, with enough conviction, and "I'm having an awesome day" starts turning true. Not toxic-positivity true — your brain's just eavesdropping on everything you say, and it starts building a case. You tell it the day's awesome, and it goes, oh, is it? Let me find the evidence. And then it does. The good coffee. The perfect light. The song that came on at exactly the right moment. The parking spot you got without circling the block twelve times.

A self-fulfilling prophecy, in the truest sense. Which, as a fiction writer, I find deeply poetic. We're all drafting our own stories all day long. The only question is which draft we keep submitting.

I'm not suggesting you pretend everything's perfect — it isn't, and nobody needs that energy. I'm suggesting something more fun: you get to choose your headline. When someone asks how you are, they're not asking for the full report. They're asking for the headline. And you're the one holding the pen.

So here's my challenge, offered with my whole heart: for the next two days — just forty-eight hours, you've binged longer TV in a single sitting — answer every "how are you?" with something wonderful. "Incredible day." "Honestly? Fantastic." "Living the dream." Say it like you mean it, even if you have to fake it a touch at first, and watch the room rearrange itself around you.

People will be confused. People will be curious. Some will smile back before they even know why. And somewhere in all that delightful chaos, you might catch yourself actually having the awesome day you announced to a bewildered cashier at nine in the morning.

The smile is free. The confusion you cause is just a bonus. ✨

So — who's in? Let's go be gloriously, defiantly, unnecessarily joyful and see how many people we can pull up short with it. Drop a comment and tell me you're joining me. And if you've already tried something like this, I want every ridiculous detail.

Because I am, for the record, having an AWESOME day. 😊

If this made you smile, pass it to someone who could use the reminder that they get to write their own headline today. And while you're here — poke around a bit. I write books too, which is really just doing this for several hundred pages at a time.