I don’t hate you. I’m not mad at you. I’m not angry. I’m not trying to make fun of you. I’m not being sarcastic. It’s not because of you. I’m sorry if my face makes you uncomfortable.

When I’m content, my face doesn’t naturally give the expressions people expect. I have to deliberately put on the right face to match my emotions. It takes constant work. I think I’ve gotten better at it, but I still slip up.

When I was younger, I was more obviously weird. I’d flap my hands when I was excited. I’d count and touch when I was anxious–really, whenever my heartbeat rose for any reason. I’d often confuse people.

Over time, I’ve learned to suppress these behaviors when others are looking. I try to do them in secret. I’ve gotten better at appearing more like everyone else.

There are many reasons I haven’t shared this before. The simplest is that I’ve long been embarrassed. I just wanted to be normal. I’ve long dealt with the comments and just wanted to disappear from them. Stop being weird. Don’t do that with your hands. Smile. Stop smiling. Why are you so quiet? Stop talking so much.

I used to pray every night to just be normal. My prayers weren’t answered, but I’ve come to accept that being different doesn’t mean being broken. Normality is not the same as goodness.

Still, much of my life has been spent learning to perform normal. Not that I can pull off normal perfectly, but at least I’ve gone from weird to serious and intense. What worries me is that people hear performance and think I’m being fake. Ironically, the spaces I struggle in the most are the rigidly informal ones, the ones where people say things like “Just be yourself,” “Relax,” “Let loose.”

The problem is, I don’t look relaxed when I’m relaxed. Relaxed for me looks angry to you. So I have a choice: perform relaxed or be relaxed. I choose the performance to make other people comfortable and myself uncomfortable. It’s exhausting.

Performance doesn’t necessarily imply artifice. Not when our bodies speak different languages. Being my true self means being misunderstood. I hate being misunderstood.

When I perform normal, I’m trying to speak your language. I’m bridging the gap so I make sense to you. I’m not being fake. I’m translating.

I’ve long described myself as an introvert because it’s safe. People think they understand introverts, and the conversation moves on. But it isn’t really right.

Imagine every time you talk to someone, you’re performing a dance. You’re trying to figure out the right one, and there are real consequences for getting it wrong. No, not that dance. Wrong dance. Do the other dance. No, too slow. That dance is offensive–stop. Do this other dance. Are you mad? Do this dance right or I’ll be angry at you. Dance or you’ll get beat up. Dance or you aren’t my friend anymore. No, now you’re dancing too much. What’s wrong with you? Just chill out. Just be yourself. No, not like that. DANCE. DANCE. JUST DO IT. WHY ARE YOU DOING IT WRONG. JUST DO IT RIGHT.

Sometimes I need to step away just to breathe. My chest feels too heavy, I can’t get a full breath. I don’t need your help… I just need space. I can’t manage my needs and yours at the same time. There’s too much noise. I just need a second to focus. Please, just one second. It’s not your fault. Just let me breathe.

In Norway, I tried to order a beer by saying, “En øl, takk.” The bartender said, “Hva?” Oool. “What?” Ouoal? Oel? Urhl? Finally, in English: “Can I have a beer?” Oh, of course.

I asked him how to say beer in Norwegian. “Ool,” he said. I repeated it: “Ool.” “No, Ool.” “Ool?” “No, it’s Ool.”

I don’t have the same level of social granularity as most people. A range of reactions that feel distinct to other people can look the same to me. I can’t reliably interpret or perform them, and when I do, it takes my full concentration.

The dances of conversation are more varied than most people realize. Your unconscious gracefulness is my conscious strain.

I’m constantly guessing what the right dance is, and when a conversation shifts, I’m left scrambling to keep up. When I’m unprepared, I freeze, trying to figure out the next step. When I guess wrong, I offend people. I’d rather you think me awkward than offensive.

I can get there, but it takes time. Often, by the time I’m warmed up and have figured out the conversation, the other person has moved on, and I’ve missed the moment.

That’s why small talk and large groups are so difficult for me. It’s a whirlwind of shifting conversations. I’m not reading just one person, but a whole group at once, and it can be too much to hold in my head. The dance changes too fast and with too many partners for me to keep up.

One-on-one, slower, longer conversations can be wonderful, especially if they’re given room to breathe. Those conversations are much rarer than I’d like.

I’m afraid to talk about this because I don’t want people to pity me or think it means I’m incapable in ways that I’m not. I worry I’ll be treated as less human, that my feelings are less real. I don’t want to be a carnival trick and have people asking me to flap my hands. I worry that if people know, every action will be scrutinized even more than it already is.

I’m tired. I’m tired of being misread. I’m at the point where the potential embarrassment is worth the chance of being understood.

Being misread has had real costs throughout my life.

In college, I was taking a microbiology lab. I loved the tactile precision; getting into the zone, trying to get everything right. One day, my girlfriend confronted me.

Her: “Why are you attacking my friends?”

Me: “What? What do you mean?”

Her: “Jeff said you were coming after him.”

Me: “Who is Jeff?”

Her: “You met him at a party a couple months ago.”

Me: “I’m sorry, I don’t know who that is.”

Her: “He says you keep staring at him in lab and mean mugging him.”

Me: “I don’t know anyone in my lab. What is mean mugging?”

Her: “I don’t believe you.”

Me: “I’m sorry.”

I broke up with her not long after–not just because of that, but from an accumulation of miscommunication. It’s hard not to be trusted.

I’ve been punched and choked because my face told the wrong story.

Once, a girl thought I was flirting with her. I didn’t know I was. She asked me out, and I was caught off guard; I didn’t have time to prepare the right dance for a gentle rejection, so I said no as best I could. She punched me in the stomach for being an asshole.

Another time, I was a little too slow getting dressed in my high school locker room. I was in the zone, thinking about something, not realizing anyone else was still there. My thinking face was read as I’m challenging you, and a much larger boy grabbed me from behind and tried to choke me out.

“What you lookin’ at, bitch?”

People often think they know what I mean before I’ve meant anything at all. My face gets there first and tells the wrong story.

People often think I’m being sarcastic when I’m not, or trying to be funny when I’m not. Something about the mismatch between how I speak and how I look makes me seem insincere, as if I must be joking. Humor lives in the small breaks between expectation and reality, and I keep stumbling into those breaks by accident.

I’m more sincere than I’m capable of outwardly expressing. Sometimes I worry that if people knew how hard I’m working, I’d seem less effortless, less charismatic. But if I have to choose, I’d rather be understood than cool.

I’ve spent most of my life learning how to make sense to other people. It would be nice, sometimes, not to be the only one doing the translating.