Trust in me, I'll give you a reason
Tonight in shower conversations, I talked to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
no subject
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.