Question for people who were once nonverbal.

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If you remember, why didn't you talk?

It's for a book I'm writing about a nonverbal autistic, so I need the answer to be as detailed as possible. Thank you!

AWESOME idea for a book.


One thing for me.... I remember thinking things, and wanting "to talk", but there was a disconnect between my thoughts and my mouth. I found this out later, when I went on an anti-depressant, and it helped me be more verbal. Things that I was thinking of saying, I actually said, whereas before, the things would just stay inside me.

ALSO, to replace talking, I wrote. I started writing poetry around age 8. I started writing in a journal at age 10, and still do, as an adult.

With me, the opposite was the case. I remember that I could talk, but just was too busy figuring things out to want to do so. I remember continously think about things going on around me and attaching rules to them. My logic was that talking took more time than the thought process, therefore wasn't worth the effort.

Later, when I did begin to talk to others, it was if there was a direct hard wire between my thoughts and my mouth. If I was in "talk mode," thinking something meant I spoke it. I was told morethan once to stop talking. It didn't work. My parents and siblings were used to the constant stream-of-conciousness I put forth, but I probably drove others quite mad.

Pops

The thing that interests me is do you regret it in some ways?

I mean I know the function of speech would have opened doors but it must have closed others as well.

I sometimes wish I had never taken up language, it's a kind of prison. I was never mute though, I didn't know you could refuse to speak. I know it's not necessarily voluntary, but in my case it would have been.

I think I stopped talking when I noticed that when I did talk, people either acted as though they did not hear me or directed some kind of insult towards me. Therefore it just made more sense to stop speaking altogether and retreat into my own thoughts. And then it became a habit.

But I was always a "very quiet" or "very shy" child, even before I completely stopped talking.

If it is of any interest, I did begin talking again later, close to adulthood.

Initially, I didn't know what words were, so the point of them was lost on me completely.

Later on, after learning to talk, started having more and more trouble with it because it had always been extremely difficult/painful/etc. And got gradually harder over time (with intermittent periods of speech and non-speech where the non-speech just got more and more frequent). So now, I don't, because I can't force the process of finding words that match my thoughts, speaking those words (while keeping to the ones that match my thoughts), and so forth, probably a combination of a motor thing, overload thing, painful speech thing, word-finding thing, multi-tasking thing, etc. all building up into a much larger thing than any one of those things are on their own.

Be aware that it can be any number of a huge amount of different things for different people. Some people, very unlike me in my early years, had never had any trouble at all with receptive language, but had trouble with the act of speech, for instance, just couldn't get words to come out of their mouth on command.

I have no memory at all of that time.

My mother just says to me that she thinks I never had anything to say. But, as I've posted before, when she was teaching me the features of my face, I'd accurately point to them when she said whatever feature it was, but I "couldn't" say the word. This was around 3 or so.

That above is all I know; in my mother's words, 'You were a walker rather than a talker.' It still holds true now.

Wow, just wanting to say that's the first time I heard that from someone. That's a bit how it feels when it happens to me when I can't talk at times.

I wonder if my grandmother got me to be verbal more quickly than I would have otherwise by constantly singing to me....it is one of the earliest memories I have of being verbal...I was prompetd to sing these songs and mimic her, even though I didn't really understand what the songs were supposed to be about...I recall her spending lengthy amounts of time doing this with me.

I wonder how less-verbal autistic kids might respond to singing...

I have heard that singing is processed in a different area of the brain, then where talking is processed. People who have lost the ability to speak after a stroke, may be able to regain their speech by singing words.

interesting.

I talk-sing...i have a musical sounding voice because I am often half-talking-half-singing...if I try "just" talking....that is when I will get very hung-up and stammery...

I can talk to myself without stammering, or losing words, but if I am around people, I tend to talk very low, or just smile alot looking like an idiot, I wish I could use singing to get the words out, but I am to shy and to self conscious. Its funny I can talk to my ferrets, but only using their language.

I was incredibly unliked in school at the time. I came up with the idea that the less noticed that I was, the less I would be actively messed with. It was basically a form of withdrawing socially, since all attempts I made in that direction ended so horribly.

I remember having a desire to have never spoken... An early movie (for me) that triggered that idea was "Scrooged" with Bill Murray, where the little timmy character just stopped speaking (or had never spoken, i can't recall right now)... But I think I just identified with him for some reason.

Also, in college... I decided to do an experiment where I stopped talking and waited to see how long it took someone, anyone, to speak to me.... I went about 4 weeks. Doesn't directly pertain to the thread... but maybe the book character could have a relapse period and decide to do something similar... for plot or something.

Good luck with the book

That sounds so familiar, sounds like you were bullied too.

Yes. It got a lot better my junior year, though. I'm sure this had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that this timeframe corresponds exactly with when my more moronic of my classmates could legally drop out of school.

I had the misfortune of growing up in a very, very small, rural and backwards place. Not a good environment to be extremely weird, socially confused and very intelligent at the same time.