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

[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.