When I was around eleven years old, I learned what an ‘emoji’, or emoticon, was. There were plenty of emojis to choose from, but I struggled to find one that would express the way I was truly feeling.  Or if I was feeling miserable, I could just pretend that everything was fine with a smiling emoji face. In our modern society, people talk face to face, and even just verbally over the phone, less and less.  This makes it much easier to hide our true emotions and distance ourselves from reality. We hide behind screens and express ourselves with over-simplified emotions, masking how we really feel. These little faces, though seemingly innocent, lead our true emotions to remain unseen. They make us simplify the things that we cannot fully understand or express into a tiny circle. Because we are limited in our abilities to express our complex emotions through tiny graphics on a bright screen, we begin to limit the way that we feel. Suddenly our emotions are confined to the number of emojis on a screen. These tiny faces can’t express pure joy or true sadness. They can’t express feeling happy and sad and mad all at once. How is it that teenage girls, some of the most emotional humans on Earth, use these simplified faces the most? Why are we now taught to hide our true feelings and to limit who we are to simple emojis?