Grief and Authenticity
I’m sitting in the living room of an Airbnb in Taipei, where my husband and I have been staying for the past few weeks. His mother is staying with us, and family members come and go. We’re getting ready to leave for a Lunar New Year meal, a gathering that carries both celebration and mourning. We are here to grieve the recent death of my sister-in-law and to support his mother as she navigates the unbearable weight of losing her daughter. In the midst of all this, the conversations we’ve had have often circled around grief and, unexpectedly, happiness—how to find it, how to hold onto it, and whether that’s even possible right now. Somewhere in the blur of these days, someone brought up the “pen experiment”—the idea that holding a pencil between your teeth, forcing your face into the shape of a smile, could trick your brain into feeling happier.
I’d heard of this before. It was one of those quirky bits of pop psychology that caught people’s attention in the late ’80s. The premise is charming: something as simple as forcing your facial muscles into a smile could shift your emotional state. But despite its initial appeal, the science hasn’t held up. Decades later, when researchers tried to replicate the original findings, the results were inconsistent at best. Forcing a smile with a pencil, as it turns out, doesn’t reliably trick your brain into happiness. The simplicity of the idea was lovely, but reality, as always, is more complicated.
And yet, I found myself wishing it worked. There’s something so wonderfully human about longing for simple fixes to complex problems. Grief, like happiness, isn’t something you can hack or shortcut your way through. It’s messy, sprawling, and deeply personal—resistant to frameworks or tricks. And while it might be comforting to imagine a world where a pencil could ease the weight of loss, that world doesn’t exist.
This has been on my mind lately, not just in the context of grief but also in the ways we approach our work and relationships. So often, we go through the motions, pretending everything’s fine when it isn’t, faking enthusiasm or commitment when we don’t feel it, sticking to rigid processes that don’t reflect the realities of our situations. It’s the professional equivalent of clenching a pencil between your teeth and hoping for the best. But authentic ways of working aren’t born out of pretense or forced alignment. They come from reflection, adaptation, and the acceptance that what works in one context might not work in another. The most effective teams aren’t the ones following a perfect framework—they’re the ones who embrace the mess and find their own way through it.
There’s something bittersweet about this realisation. I wanted the pen experiment to work because it satisfies a deep, very human craving for neat, elegant solutions. The idea that you could short-circuit the complexity of your emotions with a simple physical gesture feels like a kind of magic. And when that magic doesn’t work, it leaves behind a faint sadness—not just for the failed experiment, but for what it represents: the hope that we could make the complicated parts of life easier to bear.
But simplicity is rarely the answer. Whether we’re talking about happiness, grief, or building something meaningful with others, the truth is always more tangled and unpredictable. And that’s not a bad thing. The messiness is where the real work happens. It’s where we stumble and struggle, where we grow and connect, and where we find the things that matter most. The pen experiment might not work, but in its failure, it reminds us of a much deeper truth: life isn’t something you can force into shape.
Grief, perhaps more than anything else, teaches us this. There is no framework, no shortcut, no guidebook to make it easier. We, as a family, will grieve the loss of a sister, a daughter, a sister-in-law, and a niece in our own messy, unique ways.
As we gather for a Lunar New Year meal, there is a place laid conspicuously for her at the table. It feels both a quiet acknowledgement and a loud absence, a reflection of the love that binds us even now. Later, we will go to the temple to wish her a final goodbye. There are no forced smiles here, only the weight of what’s been lost and the strength of the family that remains.
Maybe that’s enough.
