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.
From observation, I came up with how I decided my smile should look based on my mouth and face. I remember staring into the bathroom mirror shaping my mouth with my hands until I achieved the desired look, and then I would hold it there for a while to practice. Eventually I was able to go straight into my desired smile automatically from muscle memory, and that worked out well for the dance recitals.
However, even though I could now smile when it was requested of me, I still would not smile to reflect my emotions. I remember a friend of the family visiting, as I was pouring over every page in my father’s Calvin and Hobbes collection book, and he commented on my stony disposition.
“Don’t you like Calvin and Hobbes? If I were reading that book, I would be cracking up!”
“I like Calvin and Hobbes very much,” I replied, “I just don’t laugh from reading comics, even though I can feel how funny they are in my head. I only laugh when I’m tickled.”
That was how I felt towards most things. I would feel very strong emotions, but they wouldn’t illicit any sort of facial expression in response. I was far from sad or humourless, I loved jokes and comics and cartoons and found them enormously funny. I just wouldn’t laugh at them.
As I grew older, these kinds of queries increased in frequency. Soon it came to be that every day on the playground, many of the older girls would approach me as I sat alone and ask me why I was always sad.
“I am not sad,”
“But you’re always making a sad face!”
“This isn’t a sad face, this is the face I make when I’m content” I would explain.
The girls never believed me, so instead they took it upon themselves to make sure I started enjoying myself. They invited me to play with them on the playground and went out of their ways to include me in their various activities. I understood that they were being incredibly nice and that they were attempting to help me. I understood that they inaccurately saw me as a sort of tragic figure, haunted and mournful for some mysterious reason. Therefore, to appease them, I agreed to play with them and do the various other things that they thought would make me happy. But I did not like everybody telling me that I was sad when I was actually happy. I did not like it at all.
This is why I eventually decided to “fake-smile” and “fake-laugh” whenever I felt happiness or humour in my head. I decided that I would do this to demonstrate to people that I was happy, and that way they wouldn’t think that I was sad anymore. Somehow I came to understand that this would be more effective than telling people that I was happy.
So I did just that. I did that for so many years, that I actually started to smile and laugh rather automatically in response to elation and humour. I’m still surprised that it worked, but somehow I actually trained myself into these sorts of reactions by repeating them every time I felt a certain way. Now in my adult life, smiling and laughing feel completely natural, even though they are completely learned responses. Not that I’m sure I know how “completely natural” expressions feel. But I have always laughed automatically when tickled and cried automatically when in pain, so I’ll say my expressive responses mostly feel like that now. I remember that when I first started emoting, it felt fake and like I was lying, so there’s certainly been a big change from that.
Reflecting on the behaviour of the older girls on the playground when I was a child, they certainly had a “mother hen” type of attitude towards me that I’ve heard is common in girls. This is one of the reasons that I think I was lucky to have been born a girl. Perhaps young boys can have a similar sort of mentor-relationship towards weird outcast kids, but I get the impression that it is less common.
