To follow up on anon I keep deleting and responding to, I think the reason Vienna Teng's face looks so autistic to me is the...
To follow up on anon I keep deleting and responding to, I think the reason Vienna Teng’s face looks so autistic to me is the musculature has clearly been held at low tonus and impassive this whole time, and not worn into any characteristic form
For a time during my childhood, I decided people were outright not entitled to my emotions (yes I figured out emotional labor as a kid someone give an honorary PhD) and would put effort in not emoting, which led to muscle atrophy in parts of my face. So now when I emote to me it feels like I’m moving face parts but to other people it’s not really noticeable - like I’ll raise my eyebrows in surprise and my eyebrows barely move with some extra give for the one where as a kid I practiced a one eyebrow lift with (like this emoji: 🤨). It throws people off to say the least.
The other thing is that I do smile a lot so my mouth defaults to that, even when I’m very much not smiling. I’ve grimaced at something bad and people yelled at me for smiling.
Yeah I can kinda grok all the insight I got out of this whole last personality change it’s how much I got out of the partial paralysis of my cheek muscles that fucks with me