I have developed a very convincing fake smile, but I must remember to actually use it. I do not smile or frown much naturally, and must often force myself to do so in order to communicate with those around me. Most of my emotion is communicated by subtle eye movements, which are easy for other people to miss. I do not tend to make big facial expressions. Neurodivergent people struggling to read Neurotypical people’s body language and emotions is considered a Communication Deficit, but when the places are flipped, it’s somehow still us that are the problem! It’s not, in my experience, that Schizophrenic people do not communicate our emotions, but that we communicate them differently (often more subtly), then do non-Psychotics. I don’t think I am Absent, I think maybe they just don’t know how to look. Since its inception as Dementia Praecox, Schizophrenia has been conceptualized as a condition of Loss, of Emptiness, of Breaking Down. Why we use too few words, why there seem to be no emotion behind them, why we don’t react with “appropriate” emotion to events-a Disorder of Absence, of Deficit. Reams of writing spanning 3 centuries throw words like these around pondering the reasons why people like me cannot seem communicate the way the doctors observing us want us to communicate. They call my expressions “Flat”, my way of being is characterized as a disorder of “Deficit” or “Absence”. They say I don’t show emotion Properly, as if there is such as thing as showing an emotion Properly.
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