Kharyn's world

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

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AAC = Augmentative & Alternative Communication

We've noticed that, especially when our masking is very low (aka "visibily" autistic and often using AAC or otherwise not using mouth words), we often get the urge to gently hand over the fidget we're using to the other person, not looking them in the eyes, and watch them use it and tell/show us what a good fidget it is. Then they give it back to us after a few minutes, and it feels like a very good connection has occurred.

Sometimes, if they are also using a fidget, they give us theirs until they give us ours back, and it's very nice, but it doesn't feel like it's the purpose of the interaction.

How flat affect presents for me:

Limited expressions, I need to be actively thinking about making an expression to have it happen. Additionally, it often takes multiple tries to get the expression I intended. This isn't limited to positive expressions, I also struggle to make expressions conveying things like surprise.

Practicing facial expressions as a child. Being told my smile is "fake" by adults when they wanted a picture.

Having limited tone, I struggle to convey different emotions through my voice unless I am actively attempting. This presents for me mostly as, I will make a joke and people will think I am being dead serious. Multiple times I have made something I thought was very obviously a joke, and then someone will ask me later on if I was being serious.

Shocking teachers and counselors when I do show emotion, but also not showing negative emotions how people without flat affect do. I had a panic attack, and one of my counselors managed to walk right past me crying, because I had a flat expression despite being actively sobbing. The day after this another counselor pulled me to ask if I was ok, she said she was so worried hearing that I'd cried because I "never show much emotion".

I take selfies over and over, because I cannot get the "right expression", which has resulted in me giving up and just taking selfies with my resting face. Of course if I show someone a selfie I took, the conversation always is about how I am not smiling, and how weird that is.

We are currently in the process of completely unmasking, so that's happening more often (especially with our apathetic headmate fronting), but it's always been happening to us.

Making facial expressions while unmasked takes A LOT of effort. Like, we use the energy it usually takes us to get a big grin with all our teeth showing and then we look at the photo they took of us and the corners of the body's mouth are barely curled up, and the eyes are "dead". This happens sometimes even for very big emotions, but usually not.

We also have alexithymia, so our emotional range is usually: Intense Negative Emotion - General Negative Emotion - Apathy - Calm - Positive Emotion - Intense Positive Emotion. And we can sometimes identify broad categories like angry, sad or anxious, but not often. Calm is different from Apathy, because the first it feels like relaxing in bed while interacting with your special interest, and the second feels like everything that isn't logic is turned off.

Around half the time, the expression is not what we wanted to make (intensity-wise or even type-wise, for example we often do "angry expression" when we mean to do "focused expression" or "sensual expression").

We also were told that our smile looked fake since we were a child. "[Legal name], smile! Oh c'mon, a real smile, not like that!". It's almost like they believe we are always making a funny, weird face on purpose.

We also have the same problem as OP for selfies, only that nobody ever asked us why we weren't smiling in selfies, because in our culture the normal selfie expression is a kind of "staring into the camera with mouth barely open, eyes slightly closed and face slightly tilted to the side" type of thing, and you only smile if you're making a selfie while you're really happy and you want to show it. We usually write "feeling really happy!!" (or something similar) on the selfie with our photo gallery editing options to show this.

Our favourite TV show when we were in middle school and high school was "Lie To Me", because we could learn 1) to identify emotions on others thanks to learning facial expressions (we also read a lot of "non-verbal communication" books) and 2) try to understand what muscles to use to do what expression. We almost never practiced in the mirror as a child and teen because we've always had this problem of not recognising ourselves in our reflection (when we had our syscovery a year ago this and other things made a lot of sense).

Also the same problem as OP for tone. It's either the wrong tone, no tone or inappropriate tone (for example, using a child-like voice during job interviews (we only had one, and it was for a volunteer position)). We also struggle to identify tone (and irony/sarcasm) in others, but this probably also ties in with our alexithymia. We are trying to use our AAC more also because of this.

This (and other reasons) is why stimming is important for us: when we stim our emotions are shown on our face and tone perfectly, because they just... Pour out of us, like a waterfall. This is very problematic sometimes, because one of our self-regulating stims has always been banging our head on solid wood doors (we like the sound and the repetitive movement, and we learnt early on how to do this without hurting ourselves (too much)), and it gives us such a rush that we start giggling loudly. So you see a often silent person with no facial expression that just randomly starts hitting their head on a door and laughing. We scared A LOT of people by doing this (it's "creepy" and "worrying"), so we only do it when we're alone now.

❌️ ableist

❌️ encourages capitalism

❌️ people can be losers and be employed

❌️ makes being jobless sound like a moral failing

"Get a hobby"

✔️ keeps disabled people who can't work in mind

✔️ does not encourage capitalism

✔️ if they already have hobbies you can tell them to get a new one

Come to my glade 🥰🌸✨ (/cutely threatening)