I am Autistic, yes I am Nonspeaking verbal and Yes I use AAC apps to communicate!
by Autistic AAC Underground
I loved this blogpost by Autistic AAC Underground so, so much for so many reasons. I found it another eye-opening blogpost giving me insight into the way A- could experience language, words, and also speech.
It also really gave me insight into those who are speaking but still have a very high need for support (You can hate me for this, but based on actual autistic people I know I don't believe there is just ONE autistic experience because it's spiky. I know that for some people it can cause less challenges, less often, and less as a constant, than others. And I appreciate hearing personal experiences without blanket statements!).
"For me verbal communicating is not my first language, it is actually a second language. My first language was my senses, there has always been so much information coming into them, so much communication smells, tastes, sounds, sights, and textures all had information and meaning for me and they all shaped the way i understood and saw the world. This was also the major source of my memories.""I used my senses to understand and navigate the world. I used them to have an idea on the time of day and where I was. I know it sounds crazy but i remember being able to pause what I was doing and focus on the smell of the room, the position of the sunlight and feel of it on my skin and despite the fact that I didn't have a concept of time in the sense of numbers I would know when in the day it was."
"Being such a visual and sensory based thinker was part of what caused me so much trouble in communicating, there just were no words to describe what I was experiencing or what I was thinking. I used to long for something that would allow me to communicate my way and a way that was natural for me."
"Often I would become over loaded when sounds where too loud, smells were too strong textures too rough and I would meltdown unable to communicate the pain, often I would panic and meltdown. Focusing on an interest, rocking, spinning objects and covering my ears were all things I did, and still to help me manage my sense and process my environment. I would also meltdown when people didn't understand me or would misinterpret my actions."
"As i became more and more verbal i became more and more detached from my environment and the world around me and from my sensory thinking. As i started to lose my sensory thinking some of my senses in fact began to feel a bit duller. however this did not stopped me from having sensory issues or becoming sensorially overloaded. i still have many sensory issues. they are just different now. i have the issues without the sensory connections I used to have. in losing the sensory thinking i lost a vital part of myself. The world has become even more frustrating, more confusing. I am also losing my ability to think visually the way I used to. The more I use words for communication the more I use them to think and the more the visuals fade away. I have become less able to navigate my environment. Some days verbal thinking is like a plague of a thousand voices screaming inside my head that I can't shut off. A jumbled mess of verbal thoughts with no clear point. As though my brain is spasming from the strain of thinking verbally and nothing I do will make them stop."
"With therapy more and more wires were moved to verbal thinking and processing slowly overtime I began to loose a lot of my sensory thinking and it was being replaced with verbal thinking. However unlike sensory thinking it does not feel natural and I think for me it manifest differently than for those who are natural verbal thinkers . My process seems a lot more jumbled"
"As I said this is a very stressful and tiring process for me and can even be painful. Constantly having to do this makes the world feel dead to me. And in-spite of the fact that my brain is almost always stuck in this loop there is still so much I will never be able to communicate so much that remains trapped inside of me. Even if it has been translated I can't seem to get the translated signal to travel to the next step."
"Imagine you learn a second language, you start using it more and more and as you do you grow rapidly in your fluency. You may not be as fluent as a natural born speaker of this language but you can come off as though you are. Many people may even think you are a native speaker. Slowly you use your first language less and less and slowly you start to lose your original language until one day you realize it is gone! You may know a few words in it but for all instances and purposes it is gone. You realize you can't read old notes, old letters or any of your favorite childhood stories. Nor can you understand your old favorite movies anymore. You are no longer part of your original culture and you can’t understand things from your culture. Where you live no one really speaks that language and they consider unimportant anyways. They feel that you have made huge amazing progress and maybe even better off for losing your original language. They don't understand how much it hurts you because you have lost you original language, your culture and worse you lost a huge part of who you are."
"Often I cry myself to sleep as I realize how much of the skills and understanding I once had is fading away and knowing the more I speak, the more I lose my first language, the more I become detached, and the more I lose a major part of who I am. Only to become lost locked up away in a world I can't understand, forced to communicate in a way that pleases everyone else while it continues to make everything else in my life some much harder. "
autisticaacunderground.blogspot.com
I am Autistic, yes I am Nonspeaking verbal and Yes I use AAC apps to communicate!