Theme
12:40am June 19, 2013

People who find language alien are not unusual.

Someone once responded to a post or video I made, I forget which. He started the sentence something like “If it’s really true that your first language isn’t words…” I’ve wanted to address that for awhile now.

Because he behaved as if it would be uncommon, unusual, or unheard of, for a person who could use words in some way, to feel that alienated from language. The shortest version of my reply: It isn’t.

Many people assume that when I describe my language problems, I am describing something unique to people who don’t speak. But I’m not. I used to speak and my language problems existed just as much then. Maybe more.

There are tons of people in the world who speak or type, who feel extremely disconnected from language. This isn’t unusual at all. It is no more unusual than people who have a native language and then speak a second, third, fourth, or fifth language. The only difference is that for us, language itself is our second language.

It doesn’t matter whether or when we learned to use language, either. There are people who learned to speak at the age of one who are more disconnected from language than some people who learned to speak at the age of seven, or never learned to speak. It’s not when you learned, it’s how connected you are to language in general.

And that’s not something you can easily tell by looking at a person. Well some people can. But most people can’t. Mostly it’s an experience that goes on inside a person.

What that experience looks like varies from person to person and is a topic for a different post. But describing it shouldn’t be met with skepticism any more than speaking French as a first language should be met with skepticism. It’s not that unusual. It just isn’t that talked about. There’s a difference. It’s not something that needs to be confirmed by a medical doctor in order to be true. In fact, doctors have no test for it because it’s not a medical condition. It may be related to several conditions our culture considers medical, but in itself it’s just a part of human experience.

But then lately I’ve seen a lot of people acting weird around parts of human experience. Acting like people should have to prove things about themselves that are entirely based in their internal experiences. That’s not right no matter how odd the experience seems.