A thing I’m struggling with recently (now that I’m back in a job) is having Resting Panic Face.

I’m not sure exactly what this is, in terms of how my face actually looks… except that people tend to assume I am panicking, and focus all their attention on getting me to calm down…. when I do not feel stressed at all, and can’t even discern anything about my own appearance or voice that could possibly come across as stressed.

I definitely do have times when I know I look and sound stressed. I can recognize those times. This is not that.

This is a thing that happens when I’m not stressed, because I’m in one of two other extremes: either in a good mood that blesses me with an abundance of laid-back cheerfulness, or I’m simply too exhausted to feel stress anymore.

And in either of those maximally un-stressed states, I’m trying to explain a work-related problem to someone…. and they do the Google Auto Complete thing where they keep interrupting me every 2 words with what they assume is the answer to my problem, based on the words they’ve heard so far…

and although this is a thing that easily could upset me if I was in a mood to be upset, I happen to be in a calm mood… so I just continue trying to explain the problem and gently disabuse them of every wrong assumption they’ve jumped to during my attempt at explaining….

and as far as I can tell, I am doing this as calmly and unaggressively as possible? No raised voice; tone as relaxed as I can manage. Because I’m either too tired to freak out, or in a good enough mood that it just isn’t really bothering me.

And yet. And yet, their response is never to actually listen, always to continue interrupting– but now the interruptions are all stuff like “calm down! don’t freak out, it’s okay!”

And I don’t even know where they’re getting that?

Maybe I still can’t help giving off some… aura of anxiety, when I’m dealing with behavior that could make me anxious, even if I’m not currently in the sort of mood where it has much of that effect.

Or maybe my coworkers just tend to be people who won’t be satisfied with anything I do except for perfect unquestioning acquiescence to whatever they say.

Or– actually there is one interesting little detail here. From what I’ve observed so far, this “resting panic face” phenomenon always gets worse when I’m wearing a face mask.

So it could even be something like, “people can’t see my whole face and therefore don’t know what it’s expressing, and for some reason they jump to the conclusion that it is expressing panic.”

And maybe they misread my eyes (which, when I’m in a face mask, are usually expressing “endless physical pain, because the nose seal is never ever perfect and my exhalations are not only fogging my glasses but also constantly breathing on my own eyeballs”)

And maybe no amount of emotional calmness can convince them that expression isn’t “panic.”

I don’t know.