When I was a toddler, I wasn’t supposed to be autistic. And so a speech-language pathologist told my parents that if they simply stopped responding to my made-up gesture language, I would start talking.
What followed was many years of me getting berated for being too shy, of everyone assuming I was just afraid to speak, and not that it was actually too hard.
(Before very long, I was afraid to speak, though, because I was persistently misunderstood when I did.)
For a very long time, I could not reliably use spoken language to make myself understood or get my needs met. Either because—though I could technically speak, with difficulty—I couldn’t say what I needed to, or I couldn’t get anyone to believe me when I could.
To make a long story short, I eventually found theater, and there learned the practicality of scripting—and in debate, the knack of saying things like you just expect people to believe them—and talking got a lot easier. But never truly easy.
Communicating in spoken language always feels like playing with fire. I wrote once in a journal that it felt like I was always speaking English as a second language, except that I didn’t really have a native language.
Talking is almost always an unnatural way to communicate for me. It doesn’t seem to be a strictly physical issue, like oral motor apraxia, for the most part, but feels like it has more to do with difficulty in starting and stopping, and something about my sense of timing and rhythm, of momentum and inertia. The strain of doing it too much feels very similar to that of having to multitask too much for too long.
Speaking and conversation involves some of the most complex mental gymnastics I do on a daily basis. I’m relatively good at it because I’ve forced myself into a lot of practice under difficult circumstances over the years, not because it’s natural or easy. It isn’t.
It’s been especially hard the past couple of weeks. I was working on a project during which my communication abilities got pushed to their outer limits, in multiple ways, for an extended period of time. The energy drain has taken a huge hit on my speech abilities.
It might have been a short dip—if the stress is relatively short-term and not persistent, I can recover with a single decent night’s sleep—but I just kept getting badly stressed without a chance to recover over the course of several weeks…so it’s going to be a longer dip. It’s been a couple of weeks now, and just starting to really feel better.
I can only get away with talking as much as I do because most of the speech I have to use in the course of a typical work day is at least partially scripted, which alleviates some of the stress of real-time translation involved in using spontaneous speech.
It helps to rest it and take long breaks whenever I can. I come home from work and don’t talk if I can help it. I take non-speaking days to give myself a break. On my days off, I go somewhere to read, where I won’t have to talk to anyone beyond ordering coffee. I listen to as little human speech as possible—sometimes I don’t even turn on the radio in the morning like usual. I put off phone calls. If I watch TV, I use the closed captions so I can watch more than listen. Letting myself think in pictures, patterns, and loops. Leisurely pleasure reading. Doing something with my hands that requires very little verbal thought. Getting as much sleep and downtime as possible. Staying away from multi-tasking, doing one thing at a time and letting myself sink deeply into that task…not switching back and forth between tabs in my mental browser window, so to speak.
There are times when intense practice can help to strengthen and reinforce speech abilities, but there are also times when backing off and resting is necessary to preserve those abilities. Like any other physical or intellectual exercise, it can get easier as it becomes habitual, but it can also be pushed beyond a reasonable limit.
It isn’t distressing or uncomfortable, in and of itself, to not be able to talk. Unless someone’s pressuring or forcing me, refusing or unable to understand my best efforts, or I’m in a situation where I don’t have any choice but to push through that boundary and keep doing it even though I know I’ve hit my limit.
That hurts…literally hurts. I get home sore all over, with and my ears ringing and a piercing tension headache. I’m sick and exhausted for days afterward.
But just to be able to not speak—It’s restful. It’s comfortable. It’s a relief. It’s something I need, and there’s nothing wrong with that.