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9:54pm June 16, 2012

I think this says a little too much.

So I was scanning a photo album/scrapbook type thing my mom made for me when I was little.

As far as I know there are only three, out of lots, of pictures of me under the age of two, where I appear to be both smiling and looking at the camera. Only two where you can actually see my eyes.

All three of them made it into the book. Many better photos didn’t.

(Note that I don’t think looking at the camera == eye contact. But most people looking at pictures confuse the two. So I can see why a nonautistic parent looking for nonautistic social cues would have approved of those three pictures so much. It just sort of bothers me because it marks the beginning of a lifetime of selective editing by other people to see what they want to see. They’re not bad pictures, but they represent something uncomfortable. And I can’t help but think that at least one of them was likely engineered in some way.)