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12:24am June 17, 2012

➸ chavisory's post-it notes: I think this says a little too much.

youneedacat:

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…

Yeah I’m not much for looking at cameras either. Ever since I learned it’s not required, I’ve mostly quit doing it. And I know what you mean about staging – that’s what I meant by engineered. Also my mom excelled at waiting for just the right moment to snap stuff.

People who wanted to claim I wasn’t autistic used to send around photos of me smiling or looking at the camera as if autistic people can’t do either of those things ever, WTF. But I used to laugh at them because often I owned the entire series of photos the one photo they used was plucked from. And nearly every time, those other photos would have me looking away or with odd posture or variants on my default facial expression. But they never wanted anyone to see those.

I still remember one time my mom shot an entire roll of Christmas photos of me in the same exact pose before she found one that didn’t look too weird.

I also remember that in most of my early school photos, I could only get half of my face to do what they wanted. So one eye would look at the camera, one side of my mouth would smile, the other eye turned away from the camera, the other side of my face was totally blank. And in one group photo of the same time period, I was smiling but my eyes were scrunched shut.