Autism and Smiling

My photos from childhood school picture days are hilariously bad. I hadn’t yet learned what “smiling” was supposed to look like. I just twisted my face into the widest possible grimace/smile I could manage. My bucked teeth make those smiles look even more ghastly. Autistic friends talk about similar problems, or about not understanding the difference between smiling and grimacing at all. As an adult, I’ve learned how to smile in a way that looks authentic, mostly by looking in a mirror and double checking selfies a lot, but the idea that most neurotypical people have that certain smiles are “real” and “happier” than others is baffling to me.

For me, a smile is always a social gesture. It is the way my face is supposed to look for the consumption of others. I take photos of myself to post online that are smiling, but almost all the time, I look at those photos and think about how I felt while making that face — careful concern about making sure it looked “right.” What I didn’t feel while making the face — happy. The two are not connected at all. I’m still confused, even as an adult, as to why it is that other people seem to think that they can tell the difference between “real” smiles and “fake” smiles when it comes to staring at a photograph. I don’t think anyone can, no matter what television show you’ve watched that points out how you have to look to see if the eyes are also smiling. I know how to make my eyes smile…