as small as a world and as large as alone

8:13pm May 7, 2014

I had to put this up for Speak Your Language Day, even though it makes me kind of cringe a lot because it was my viral video.  Please understand that the fact that, at this point in my life, I can’t speak, is completely incidental to the actual meaning of the video.  If I had been able to narrate it with my voice, it would mean the exact same thing it means now.

Also understand that it was never meant to be specific to autism.  This is about a broad disability experience where anyone whose natural, internal language is different from the norm, has to either learn the dominant language or be judged incapable of thought and communication.  And it can be applied – and has been, by Chicana activists – to the experience of speaking Spanish as a child in a school where English is the only language “intelligent” people are supposed to speak.  It’s meant to be one specific instance of a huge, huge problem.  And my favorite responses to it have always been people who applied the meaning of the video to situations quite different from my own in some of the particulars.  Rather than people who just sat there and gawked at the fact I could communicate.

Many disabled people are essentially a linguistic minority of one.  Those of us who get lucky can learn a “second language” – the language spoken by nondisabled people around us.  Those of us who get very lucky will meet people who learn to speak our language.  But a lot of people get by with an extremely unusual way of communicating, and no standard language to back it up or have their communication recognized as communication.  I made this for all of us and more.

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