9:14pm June 11, 2012

➸ chavisory's post-it notes: goldenheartedrose: ceilingvriska: While I love my little brother with...

youneedacat:

feliscorvus:

goldenheartedrose:

ceilingvriska:While I love my little brother with

Funnily enough, it sounds like both of you had better early expressive language than I did.

I didn’t speak at all till age three, not even in echolalia. Though the basis for my supposedly not being autistic was that I understood everything that was said to me. My expressive language was incredibly poor up until I was a teenager, but my receptive language was always very good…though incredibly buggy and idiosyncratic.

And so, dear OP, this is how lots and lots of people have gone a very long time undiagnosed with autism that we actually had, back in the 1980’s and earlier, when incidence was supposedly something like 1 in 10,000. They were just willfully ignoring the vast majority of us, out of misinformation, false stereotypes, fearmongering, ignorance, and bigotry about what autistic people can and can’t be capable of.

I mean think about it. There was a time when only 11 children in the US were diagnosed with autism. That does not mean that only 11 children in this country were actually autistic.

Yeah. Probably. Although I’d say superficially better – actual percentage that had anything to do with what I was thinking was extremely low. That’s a common pattern with bad receptive language. Where if you do have expressive language at all, it’s intensely messed up.

And then by the time you’re old enough to understand things, your brain has already laid down pathways for speech (and sometimes writing) that have nothing to do with communication. So then instead of just learning to connect meaning to words, you also simultaneously have to force out of the way everything you’ve ever learned about words. Which is like trying to wrestle into submission a greased pig made out of language.

The good part though is that even if you can only fake communication, you get taken more seriously than someone who can’t talk at all. The bad part is you still can’t say what you mean, or not consistently or often.

Apparently the sucky receptive/highly echolalic expressive thing is a common thing with hyperlexia. It also seems tied to a bunch of other cognitive traits I have in common with feliscorvus, Donna Williams, and others. And the greased pig problem is one of several reasons I can’t use speech to communicate. (I think Donna compared it to trying to tame a wild stallion. Versus trying to urge forward a stubborn horse that refuses to move, which is more conventional speech delay. They’re both damn near impossible at times, just in different ways.)

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