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10:05am May 26, 2014

walkingsaladshooterfromheaven:

I’ve realized going nonverbal isn’t always a bad thing in my case?

Like sometimes it’s in response to being triggered or under too much stress and those things themselves are bad

but being nonverbal isn’t itself bad because it’s like my brain is just taking a break from talking, and while it’s doing that it can do other things and process things better than it can while i’m in verbal mode.

there are certain kinds of important thought work that i can get done only when i’m nonverbal.

(of course, that kind of important thought work is harder if i’m stressed/triggered.)

but like … sometimes i feel like i’m most myself when i’m nonverbal.

There was a period of time when I was able to speak some of the time, but only with great difficulty, and it created a huge amount of strain – physically, cognitively, and emotionally.

And during that time is when I first acquired a means to communicate using AAC: an AlphaSmart keyboard.

And my friends immediately told me that when I used the keyboard, I was like an entirely different person.  More spontaneous, more perceptive, more able to do conversational give and take, funnier, and more interesting in general.  And they could see elements of my personality that had been hidden before, because speaking had taken up so much of my brainpower that it had actually overshadowed huge parts of who I was.

I wrote this during that time period:

http://archive.autistics.org/library/spchasst.html