As a child, I did not smile or laugh as a response to the emotions I felt.\u00a0 I would laugh in response to physical stimuli, such as when being tickled, but that was it.\u00a0 This first presented a problem for me when I was enrolled in dance classes.\u00a0 Each class had an annual dance recital, and as part of that performance we had to smile.<\/p>\n
When I was first asked to smile during practice, I did my best approximation of a toothy smile, learned entirely through observation.\u00a0 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, \u201cYou smile weird.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed I can hardly blame them, my smile was weird.\u00a0 Almost terrifyingly so.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I know this from looking at my old dance photos, which I\u2019m now embarrassed to look at what I once thought was a totally normal smile. \u00a0In light of this new information, in order to perform the dance correctly, I decided to teach myself how to smile.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
From observation, I came up with how I decided my smile should look based on my mouth and face.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Eventually I was able to go straight into my desired smile automatically from muscle memory, and that worked out well for the dance recitals.<\/p>\n
However, even though I could now smile when it was requested of me, I still would not smile to reflect my emotions.\u00a0 I remember a friend of the family visiting, as I was pouring over every page in my father\u2019s Calvin and Hobbes collection book, and he commented on my stony disposition.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t you like Calvin and Hobbes? If I were reading that book, I would be cracking up!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI like Calvin and Hobbes very much,\u201d I replied, \u201cI just don\u2019t laugh from reading comics, even though I can feel how funny they are in my head. I only laugh when I\u2019m tickled.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was how I felt towards most things.\u00a0 I would feel very strong emotions, but they wouldn\u2019t illicit any sort of facial expression in response.\u00a0 I was far from sad or humourless, I loved jokes and comics and cartoons and found them enormously funny.\u00a0 I just wouldn\u2019t laugh at them.<\/p>\n
As I grew older, these kinds of queries increased in frequency.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am not sad,\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut you\u2019re always making a sad face!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis isn\u2019t a sad face, this is the face I make when I\u2019m content\u201d I would explain.<\/p>\n
The girls never believed me, so instead they took it upon themselves to make sure I started enjoying myself.\u00a0 They invited me to play with them on the playground and went out of their ways to include me in their various activities.\u00a0 I understood that they were being incredibly nice and that they were attempting to help me.\u00a0 I understood that they inaccurately saw me as a sort of tragic figure, haunted and mournful for some mysterious reason. \u00a0Therefore, to appease them, I agreed to play with them and do the various other things that they thought would make me happy.\u00a0 But I did not like everybody telling me that I was sad when I was actually happy.\u00a0 I did not like it at all.<\/p>\n
This is why I eventually decided to \u201cfake-smile\u201d and \u201cfake-laugh\u201d whenever I felt happiness or humour in my head.\u00a0 I decided that I would do this to demonstrate to people that I was happy, and that way they wouldn\u2019t think that I was sad anymore.\u00a0 Somehow I came to understand that this would be more effective than telling people that I was happy.<\/p>\n
So I did just that.\u00a0 I did that for so many years, that I actually started to smile and laugh rather automatically in response to elation and humour.\u00a0 I\u2019m 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.\u00a0 Now in my adult life, smiling and laughing feel completely natural, even though they are completely learned responses.\u00a0 Not that I\u2019m sure I know how \u201ccompletely natural\u201d expressions feel.\u00a0 But I have always laughed automatically when tickled and cried automatically when in pain, so I\u2019ll say my expressive responses mostly feel like that now.\u00a0 I remember that when I first started emoting, it felt fake and like I was lying, so there\u2019s certainly been a big change from that.<\/p>\n
Reflecting on the behaviour of the older girls on the playground when I was a child, they certainly had a \u201cmother hen\u201d type of attitude towards me that I\u2019ve heard is common in girls.\u00a0 This is one of the reasons that I think I was lucky to have been born a girl.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As a child, I did not smile or laugh as a response to the emotions I felt.\u00a0 I would laugh in response to physical stimuli, such as when being tickled, but that was it.\u00a0 This first presented a problem for me when I was enrolled in dance classes.\u00a0 Each class had an annual dance recital, … Continue reading “Learning to Laugh”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19,129],"tags":[96],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-stories","tag-childhood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.certainly-strange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.certainly-strange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.certainly-strange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.certainly-strange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.certainly-strange.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.certainly-strange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":250,"href":"http:\/\/www.certainly-strange.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions\/250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.certainly-strange.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.certainly-strange.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.certainly-strange.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}