@Solifuge: You're probably right.
(Sorry, that is the best anyone is going to get out of me right now. I'll probably say something more tomorrow, but right now I just... don't... have... the... energy...)
But having bad body language skills isn't a huge deal, and it can be easily be compensated for.
Not for me. This is why I'm so good at picking apart rhetoric--I honest-to-goodness can't read tone or figure out how people feel most of the time, so I've gotten very, very good at looking at particular words and sentence structures so that I'll know how to respond (basically appease, smite, or ignore). I am... very... bad with facial expressions and emotions/motivations in general; most of my understanding of body language is very binary good/bad or attached to situational information, not emotional/internal information. It's even worse because most of the time, I forget to even pay attention--I'll go "Oh, yay, I'm talking to someone! And they're talking back! This is good!" and then later I'll think "I have no idea how the other person felt or thought about that at all, because I was so busy trying to keep saying things at roughly the right time."
Books were also a big thing, when I saw lines like "she gave a wry smile", it helped me a lot in connecting the dots between expressions and intentions.
Yeah, I've done that, too, but "expressions and intentions" wasn't what I was working on, it was "expressions are attached to emotions at all." My entire time in elementary school I'd complain about feeling sick and having a stomachache, and I only later realized that it was because I was socially stressed (it'd come up without fail if I spent more than an hour or two at someone else's house, because I just couldn't stand being around people that long). Or I'd be at someone's house and I'd just wander off outside because I couldn't take it anymore. Didn't understand the feeling or the trigger... just something that said "time to be outside and touch rough things now" and a rubbery feeling of being unable to move my face.