Trust in me, I'll give you a reason

[sovay]

Tonight in shower conversations, I talked to spatch about how ambivalently I feel about the fact that I had to learn to signal my emotions beyond my natural facial reactions because otherwise people wouldn't believe that I felt what I felt (another inescapable form of social lying) and he assured me that by now it looks very natural and microexpressive and then I felt even more ambivalently about that. Does everyone just learn the right faces to make and then never mention it in polite company so that it just looks natural from the outside and each person secretly assumes they're the one acting? Concern, distaste, appreciation, perplexity. All the little noises you make to people to tell them that you're really interested in what they're saying. Did you really think that those gogglers knew you for yourself without any help from me? No, I had to give you an aspect they could understand, and a horn they could see. These days, it takes a cheap carnival witch to make folk recognize a real unicorn. I still have to tell people sometimes that I really am happy about something even if I am not demonstrating the socially normative level of shrieking and flailing. It is just so often exhausting.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks]

It is exhausting, and I do it too. It's because of being hypersensitive to visual sensory input; other people will not notice my expressions unless they are way, way, way exaggerated, even though I certainly notice theirs. One reason I find you and Ruth and my other partners so relaxing is that I don't have to exaggerate as much.

I also feel as though I'm shouting when I talk at what I am told is a reasonable volume.

[thisbluespirit]

It does sound exhausting and I'm sorry. Although since body language is a language, then to have learned it well is an achievement, just as learning any other language is, even if it's rotten that you had to.

And then I read this: even if I am not demonstrating the socially normative level of shrieking and flailing. and realised we have serious cultural differences here. That's not especially socially acceptable in the UK, except if maybe you are the kind of person to whom it comes naturally and you've just achieved your life's goal. (I mean that goes double for round here, as I live in the North where socially acceptable is that eventually you will smile at someone when they have been here at least three years and properly earned it, accompanied by huge friendliness underneath. I'm from the south, though - I smile too much and give too much away, and people don't believe me when I'm sad.)

[asakiyume]

I think it's like everything else (whiteness, heterosexuality, etc.): there are settings that, for whatever reason, are considered the default in a given place and time, and if you happen to be born with the default settings, then lucky you! But if not, it's work, and exhausting the way any non-default setting is.

Because situations and types of socio-emotional evincing are so varied, and because interpretations of and opinions on what's the default varies, I think probably a fair number of people have the experience at least at some point in their life of being "off" in some way or other. Hence the huge prevalence of social media memes and posts where people say "I feel so strange because I..." and "Am I the only one who..." (often about what seem to me to be completely ordinary things). I know you're not talking about an instance, though; you're talking about a general way of being. And that's rough, and being told you make a difficult, exhausting set of behaviors look natural is demoralizing when what you're yearning for is not to have to perform a bunch of behaviors to be understood.

That's a super apposite quote from The Last Unicorn, and one of the most memorable lines, for me, in the book.

[moon_custafer]

I can recall disliking my facial expressions as a child, as they felt too extreme – like losing control. At the same time it annoyed me that my mouth did not actually form a U shape when I smiled. I think I wanted to be a cartoon character; they have nice simplified readable faces.

Also I’m pretty sure my gestures and body language are derived from a mix of cartoons, old movies, fashion illustrations, and the occasional medieval manuscript marginal illumination.

[selkie]

Eh. Make the teethface. People like it okay. I think.

(We don't see each other as often as one would like, so one is a skish out of practice with interpretation, but I have always been able to get at least the broad strokes of your mood from your facial affect. I think you're fine and have been. But I understand the exhaustion of Essentials of Performative Social Humanness.)

...People say I look terribly, darkly angry all the time, to which I make the teethface.

[sporky_rat]

Most appropriate Mommy Fortuna quote. It's how I feel about learning to use the right facial expression for the right time.

[phi]

A university (that I did not end up attending) almost revoked my acceptance because when the admissions officer called to tell me, I did not perform eagerness to her expectations. I was beyond thrilled to get in, and it came down to a coin toss between that school and my alma mater. But my reaction to that kind of emotion is to freeze, rather than show it outwardly, and the admissions officer took that very badly.

Which is a long way of saying I get you.

[ada_hoffmann]

I'm sure this isn't an issue unique to autistic people, but it is an issue which is very common among autistic people and likely other non-neurotypical types.

I dated an autistic person a while back who got criticized a lot (even by people who should know better, like his parents!) for "never getting excited", or people would call him a robot, etc - he did experience excitement and many other emotions in ways that were visible to me, but they were subdued compared to what most people expected.

Other autistic people (I know this from the Internet, not personally) have this issue so markedly that they cannot even facially convey pain or distress in a way that neurotypical people will recognize, which leads to issues when, for example, seeking medical help.

My own mother says I acted like a robot when I was 3, but I grew out of it.

[davidgillon]

People are generally bad on pain, whether you're neurodiverse or neurotypical. They expect severe pain to mean screaming, and it rarely does come to that, especially with chronic pain.

OTOH I got to be fairly good at reading facial expressions for the moment they decided I was lying about the amount of pain I was in.

[selkie]

Concur! Sadly. (I am mostly neurotypical except for a squibbly amygdala from childhood trauma, and I have been in escalating chronic genetic pain for years; getting people to take you seriously when you're not bleeding and are generally fairly stoic and, apparently, murderous-looking is a difficult thing. Fun tiiiiimes.)

[davidgillon]

Even the paramedics looked a little dubious when scooping me off the bathroom with acute pancreatitis. Admittedly even I was a little dubious about the amount of pain I was in and saying "I'm normally much better than this at handling pain".

Fortunately the A&E consultant must have been better at reading things, because he ignored the car crash victim with multiply splinted limbs on the next trolley, shot me full of morphine and walked me through the system himself.

[sovay]

They expect severe pain to mean screaming, and it rarely does come to that, especially with chronic pain.

I feel like this is its own entire conversation: I have such history with people not believing my pain and I know I am not alone.

[swan_tower]

I wound up asking once on my blog how many women actually scream when frightened or otherwise provoked -- meaning full-on movie screaming, as opposed to a yelp or some other sound. Turns out some of 'em do! It has always seemed utterly fake to me, but for some people it's a natural reaction, or at least learned so early it feels natural.

The thing that provoked me into asking this was when my husband accidentally kicked me in a badly-sprained toe, causing a sudden, severe, and completely unexpected spike of pain. I yelled, but I didn't scream. For yea verily, I come from a Stoic People (Scandinavian on my mother's side, and I imprinted). One time I managed to annoy my husband because I'd said I would drive someone home that night, but asked him to do it instead because "I'm not feeling all that well." While he was gone I started puking into the toilet, in the first stomach flu of my life. He's got practice in translating Me to Normative English, but even then didn't realize on that occasion what "I'm not feeling all that well" signified.

But it's like asakiyume said above: this kind of thing is very culturally determined, in addition to being individual.

[davidgillon]

It is subtly different, in that people are generally mis-reading pain expressions from lack of experience, but it's also in many ways a cultural bias around how pain is expressed:- "Well, we expect stiff upper lip from people, but I know if I stub my toe I yell, therefore no yelling = manageable pain." But that startled pain reaction only applies to unexpected injuries, not so much "Oh, shit, this is going to hurt," or "so this hurts, as usual".

[ethelmay]

A stubbed toe sometimes is the worst pain ever for the first half a second, though. The one time I've ever had pain that bad that continued, I kept right on screaming until it stopped, which fortunately was not actually very long.

[davidgillon]

And there's the other extreme, where you deliberately suppress showing the pain you're in because it would needlessly complicate the ongoing social interaction. Which ironically was exactly where I found myself when I went out after my initial posts. It was near the end of the evening, so I just made my excuses and left, but realistically I was at 9-10 out of 10, and I know what 10 feels like. (Fortunately it didn't last long).

[rachelmanija]

But if you do scream they think you're faking it unless you are also profusely bleeding.

[sovay]

But if you do scream they think you're faking it unless you are also profusely bleeding.

"No one believed me unless they could see me bleeding on the floor" was in fact how it boiled down for me.

[davidgillon]

There's that, too. Especially for people who present as female.

[ashlyme]

I've never known just what the "correct" expressions are. Either my face shows all too well what I really feel about something (which I don't always realise) or it's a perpetual gurn and grimace machine (or that's how I feel about it, anyway). I have a similar disconnect with my voice; I hate speaking loudly, and repeating what I say even more so. I have my animated/enthusiastic moments, and then feel as if I look like an idiot shortly afterwards. I've every sympathy.

[davidgillon]

I actually remember teaching myself to to do eye-contact as a teenager. And wide smiles have always looked somehow fake to me. When we had American exchange students at uni there was a marked difference in facial expressions, theirs were far louder, for want of a better term

I guess we live in the age of squeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!, and, for the millenials, even the people of the recent past are a different country.

[thistleingrey]

I kind of learned in grad school how to emote in ways other people could handle, and now I turn it up slightly for my current workplace. It has become automatic enough that I don't always think of it as masks, but it is masks. I dunno.

[alchimie]

I sympathise with this a great deal; some days our face just does all the things faces are expected to do and nobody here has to think about it, and on other days it is an immense struggle to make the correct faces at the correct times, which is exhausting. There is likely a correlation to other things in our life, but I have never chased down exactly what that correlation is.