I can’t be happy, because if I do then my voice will go monotone and I’ll forget to make the right faces. This sentence floored me: “She’s far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine.” That’s why I squash my emotions in public. Keiko feels lonely in the way I often do: not because we lack company, but because praise for a persona that we cultivate for others suggests that no one loves our real self. Employers are narrow-minded (“If I ever became a foreign object, I’d no doubt be eliminated.”), but so are most people, or they’d stop requiring us to mimic them. For her and for me, socialising isn’t “leisure”. Keiko never clocks off from acting “normal”. I smiled whenever I recognised an experience, which meant I basically smiled for the whole book. I’d thought my brain was too different to appear in a novel, but there I was.
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