Aspies For Freedom

Cool. Her blog's gonna get swamped now...

It can be difficult to determine whether you show your opinion in the first sentences.

There was an interesting point in one of the comments below the blog entry.

It referred to 'facilitated communication' whereby facilitators subconsciously, effectively, 'put words into people mouths' in this kind of situation.

Does anyone know whether Amanda Baggs has such a 'facilitator' or whether she's doing all this off her own bat?

I wonder how she learned to type.  I learned at school.  She can type faster than me.

I would maybe have an interest in german if it wasn't thought at school.

... makes me feel that I don't have any control over it.

Yes Amanda ^_^ you go gurl!

*passes the bong*

She actually lost (limited) verbal language during her teen years (I think... IIRC from her blog); so she probably learned how to type the same way anybody else does--knowing how to read and reproducing the words on the keyboard, then speeding up as you get familiar with the keyboard. I'm not sure if she was hyperlexic as a kid. Wouldn't be surprised. Anyway, not talking doesn't mean you don't have receptive language, so in that case you could teach a kid to type even though he can't talk to you. Auties have weird skill scatters like that all the time.

...which makes me wonder, if I had a stroke and lost the ability to speak, would that mean I might retain the ability to type?...

The only choice in the way I live my life at the moment is the choice not to be ashamed.  I can't use speech to pass or converse anymore (previously it was limited in meaning what I meant, but it could sound actually quite profuse if I was repeating things a certain way -- I lost it in infancy, regained it, then gradually lost it), and I can't last long in a lot of situation without either letting my body do whatever it's trying to do (whether stimming or extreme stillness) or doing things that are actually destructive.  And I'd rather not do things that are destructive.  

I don't have the energy to do the things most people would expect of me, it's just not there, sometimes I even wish I could because it would cause less reactions (not that I really wish I could, but it's one of those things that would be more convenient sometimes in a world that reacts badly to those things), just like the only reason I ever wish I could talk is so that people wouldn't focus incessantly on the fact that I don't (and try to fill in their own histories that don't actually fit with mine).  I think some people get confused because I don't talk about these things as awful things I can't help doing.  I just try to have no more shame about them than about any other aspect of being disabled, because what's the point?  It's another waste of energy and due to additional disabilities and chronic pain I don't generally have the energy to waste.

I don't even know what the "NT world" is.  It's not like I live my life totally cut off from NTs or something, I just can't emulate them too much.  I meet them halfway but I can't go further than that, sometimes can't go that far either.  I think I function better in general, including socially, working with the way my brain works rather than against it (another one of those things about efficient uses of energy).

And yeah I learned to type the absolute usual way that most people learn to type, in school.

Any other information about me can be determined from reading my blog thoroughly.    (I'm really, really wiped out lately.  I was in the hospital recently for physical problems and I'm not sure I've totally recovered.)

I posted a comment, trying to clarify some of the more glaringly obvious misperceptions, both about autistics in general and about Amanda in particular.

I am always pretty happy when there is a positive article about autistics, though usually the reporters take such a dichotomous approach: either they go the "autism is a tragedy" route, or they go the "some autistics may be brilliant / more intelligent than we thought, so that's why they don't want to be cured".

I wish they would go with a "let's look at what people have to say, and then actually listen instead of simplifying / distorting it" approach - the last type being particularly rare.

I forgot, obviously, that anbuend went to school before.

Think I've just misunderstood really, but it was at least these sentences that puzzled me - especially "never appeared to stop and think that doing X isn't doing her any favours".

I did, for some time, learn to hide things, to a degree.  Then I became less able to.  At which point, my self-consciousness or lack thereof became a moot point in a way, because it was happening no matter how I felt about it.

There's no single reason for it.  I know people who say they feel so much anxiety they can't talk, either in some situations or all situations.  I know other people where anxiety has nothing to do with it.  Some people have real trouble with the motor sequences for deliberate speech (but can sometimes spit out automatic words), some people have no motor problems at all.  In my case, it's a combination of cognitive problems and motor-planning problems:  My mouth can get words out, but they aren't the ones I want, usually.  My personal suspicion is it has to do with the way in which I was taught speech, as I know other people taught speech in similar ways who have the same problem to various degrees.  (We did not learn it as communication, and thus it functions in a way different from communication even when it does function.  And many of us also had receptive language problems that were severe enough that when we were beginning to learn speech, we didn't understand what it was for, and those are the pathways that got laid out in our brains or whatever when speech was developing.)  And as my motor problems became worse (a thing that happens to some autistic people in adolescence regardless of prior apparent "functioning level"), it became harder and harder to wrest control of it to make it make sense in any way.  Far easier to wrest control of words in typing, for reasons I don't fully understand, but that are probably just the mirror-image of most people (who have more trouble with writing than speech).

While I know a whole lot of people who have similar problems in those areas, one thing I won't claim to be is typical, although I don't know any autistic person who can truly make that claim.  I know a lot of autistic people whose experience of speech troubles is very foreign to me, consisting entirely of being for some reason unable to form words, but fully understanding of language around them.  Whereas for me, my ability to understand language gradually trickled into my brain after I'd learned to imitate speech and even fashion it into recognizable patterns.

I saw an autism researcher who actually had me go through what sorts of speech I could at this point in my life do at least some of the time (imitation, singing, non-linguistic utterances, and ticcing) and what sorts I could not do (just talking as communication), and said she thought she knew exactly what area of my brain was functioning differently than usual.  But I can't remember what it was.  I do know that there are now very rare times when speech functions normally for me, but I can't force it to do that, it's limited to somewhere between one and three words, and it's less than once a year.  My guess is that those times are sort of the way a stopped clock is right twice a day:  sometimes what comes out of my mouth will actually apply to the situation, in other words.

So for me it's something that happened probably early in my speech development that never allowed speech to fully settle in as something useful in the ordinary sense (the signal to noise ratio was too low), probably tied into hyperlexia with its receptive language problems, and if you add in something that's only shaky to begin with, and then voluntary movement gets wonky in itself, then it's not really going to function that well all combined.  And, as I said (I think I'm really repetitive sometimes), this is not how it is for everyone who is autistic and doesn't speak, although it is how it is for some autistic people I know who don't speak, and a few who do speak but find it extremely difficult (as I used to).  There are plenty of other reasons not to speak.

Also, one thing I've wondered about with the anxiety question, I've wondered ever since MIT measured that thing about me with voluntary movement:  My stress response is pretty high just trying to move purposely (even wiggling my toes), even though involuntary and triggered movements (rocking, typing) do not trigger a stress response.  (In ordinary people, not even vigorous movements trigger stress responses.)  And I've wondered, for people I know who say that their anxiety is too high to be able to speak or type easily, whether the real problem is that the act of trying to do so is so stressful in itself (because of the difficulty level) that it leads to a feeling of anxiety, rather than the feeling of anxiety making the action difficult.  I mean, it's a chicken and egg question, but based on my experiences it might actually be one worth asking.

"Elective" is even an outdated term for it, the new version being "selective", because it's only in some situations but not others, but not chosen by the person.  "Elective mutism" isn't even a proper diagnostic term anymore.  (And the "selective mutism" thing is said to have to do with anxiety, not with any of the other reasons that a person might sometimes be unable to talk.)