During high school, I took a class focused on Dante’s Inferno. Sometimes we took turns reading aloud in class. One day, it was my turn to read a passage in which one or another of the damned was expressing the horror of his situation. After I read, the teacher asked me to try again and to be more emotive, to express the horror in my speech rather than just reading the words. I tried again, and did no better. This repeated several times. The teacher wanted me to speak the words as though I were feeling the emotional distress of the scene, but my voice just got more wooden and unexpressive. There was some miscommunication here. As this scene progressed, my lack of emotional expression was the result of emotional distress. So, the teacher was in fact getting what he asked for, but not what he wanted. He didn’t want me to act as I would, but as a neurotypical person would.

Part of why it was hard for me put on a melodramatic display of emotion is that it felt false to me. To my mind, surely real pain and horror would not be the time for social display. That’s what people do when they want to perform emotions for others, not when they actually feel them.