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…