I’m apparently very pleasant to be around, right up until I’m not, and I’ve stopped feeling like I need to apologize for that being true.

Small talk is usually where it starts. I can do it, I’m not incapable, I just start doing the mental maths around minute four on whether either of us is getting anything out of this, and once I’ve done that maths, it’s very hard to keep pretending the answer isn’t obviously no. People have called this rude. I don’t think it’s rude exactly, I think it’s closer to running out of patience for something going nowhere on purpose, but I understand why it looks the same from the outside.

My mouth is fairly well behaved, generally. It says the polite thing, the diplomatic thing, whatever you’re supposed to say when someone’s just told you something spectacularly wrong with total confidence. My face was never given the same instructions. It does something quite specific in these moments, apparently, because more than one friend has told me they can watch it happen, usually well before I’ve said a word out loud. I’ve never seen it myself. I just get told about it afterward, like a weather report for a storm I apparently caused.

I used to say yes to a lot of things I didn’t want to do, because saying no felt like a small act of aggression I wasn’t allowed to commit. I don’t do that anymore. It’s a sentence, not a crime, and most people survive hearing it, which was genuinely news to me for a long time.

None of this makes me difficult, and if it does, it’s earned, not random. I’m easy enough to talk to if the conversation’s actually going somewhere. I ask a lot of questions, more than most people find comfortable, because half-understanding something bothers me more than most things do. Bureaucracy, for reasons I’ve never worked out, finds me specifically, out of everyone in a room.

I write. I do other things too, most of them less interesting than the writing. My mouth says I’m nice. Ask my face.