My life has been… on fire lately, and quite frankly I don’t really want to go into it. I will likely have more to say on it in the future, but for now I’m just trying to endure until I can get to living.

There is something that I do want to talk about however, and that is about my experience with my voice and some of the work I’ve been putting into unmasking.

I Struggle With Words

I am plenty aware of the irony of being a content creator and blog writer who says that they struggle with words, but hear me out.

One of the earlier ways that I tried to explain my experience with speech was that my brain works similar to someone who is ESL(English as a second language). Which by a certain view is true, my first language was twin, something that developed between my sibling and I that wasn’t English. Admittedly I haven’t spoken or heard it in literal decades, but I remember it and had reports that confirmed it.

Nonetheless when I go to say or write something my brain still needs to go through a translation layer. For everything. Even writing this I am needing to translate it from my thoughts/feelings into the outside words. As part of this I actually script most of what I say to people. I have countless (probably at least hundreds) of snippets of common phrases/collections/etc that I put together what I want to say without having to make something entirely new. It’s about the only way I’ve found to be able to functionally interact with the wider world because my speed for it otherwise is probably around half or even quarter of most people, and even then it’s still going to be stalling at points.

This is not new to me. I figured it out some decade + change ago when I first started investigating if I was Autistic, and I saw signs of it years before that point. But I could also tell that it didn’t really cover the entirety of my experience, that there was more to it.

The Non-Verbal Experience

There are times when I want to say something and I’m unable to or I have to fight really hard to get them out. Metaphorically it’s almost like having to push my hand through a thin sheet of ice in order to say something. When it’s easier the ice is very thin or even not there and costs me little to be able to say something. When it’s hard the ice is thick and it hurts to push through, especially if I have to do it repeatedly in a row. This can impact anything from my physical ability to be verbal(pretty common) and sometimes it can impact my ability to write too.

Up until the past few months I only associated being non-verbal with the worst of my times with it. When I was having a full meltdown or something otherwise traumatic was happening. When it hit I wouldn’t be able to get my words out no matter how hard I tried. I learned to associate it to something that should be avoided, that was bad and negative. I treated going non-verbal as a failure to manage my condition, with a lot of attached judgement. I also associated it with the terrible things that had happened, the traumas of yelling or violence, or not having the supports I needed in a place from a sensory perspective.

The important takeaway here is that my view was my going non-verbal was exclusively bad. A part of me to be controlled and avoided, and only existing as a burden to myself and others.

Then I had someone who flipped my view of how I experience being non-verbal.

Regrettably I don’t remember the exact conversation, in part because it was some time ago and also because there have been so many conversations since. However what I can remember is that I learned something very important about myself, that being non-verbal is a part of how my brain works, and that it is far more involved in my daily experience than I had thought.

As I looked deeper on this I kept learning more about myself. I learned that I have been masking a lot by forcing myself to be verbal because that is what I had been conditioned to do. I realized that I had been ignoring that feeling of pushing through, treating it as it was something everyone went through. I began to realize how much it was actually costing me on a daily basis to push through like that. I also began to learn what positive accommodation for it could feel like. Bit by bit I’ve been experimenting with unmasking about this, of not forcing myself to push through the wall.

Some of the accommodations I’ve been learning about:

• Safe space to be non-verbal. Not having to explain it or have it treated as if it might be a crisis.
• Having ways to signal when non-verbal I’m feeling non-verbal, or the level of it
• Support to fallback to partial verbal or text communication
• Agreed on Signs of when I’m doing ok/not ok

There are other supports that I’m looking into/experimenting with such as having digital stickers, and also picking up more sign language to expand my options for when it comes up. But more than any of these what I’ve learned is that it is ok that I experience being non-verbal, and that it is also ok for me to expect it to be understood and respected if someone wants to be in my life. Also I’ve learned that I can both be non-verbal at times and still treated as intelligent & capable.

I have so much I’ve been unpacking around this when it comes to disability theory, and plenty else, but this post is long enough and I’m still chewing on those thoughts for now. I’m hoping to come back to this topic in the future though with more.

Also I’ve struggled with writing this blog entry so much, and there is such an obnoxious irony in struggling with being non-verbal with a post about being non-verbal.

Till next time
– StarChild