As a child, I did not smile or laugh as a response to the emotions I felt. I would laugh in response to physical stimuli, such as when being tickled, but that was it. This first presented a problem for me when I was enrolled in dance classes. Each class had an annual dance recital, and as part of that performance we had to smile.
When I was first asked to smile during practice, I did my best approximation of a toothy smile, learned entirely through observation. The teacher seemed satisfied by this attempt, but after a while of my consistently smiling in this way, some of the girls in the class told me quite frankly, “You smile weird.” Indeed I can hardly blame them, my smile was weird. Almost terrifyingly so. I would pull back my lips and show both rows of teeth, as big as I could, and for some reason I favoured the right side of my mouth. I know this from looking at my old dance photos, which I’m now embarrassed to look at what I once thought was a totally normal smile. In light of this new information, in order to perform the dance correctly, I decided to teach myself how to smile.