Sometimes if I have to say something I haven't said before I can feel the words escaping from my head. Most of when I speak at work is pretty formulaic and with lots of different "stock phrases" - I guess you'd call them. But I hate going mute (especially when I'm stressed or having to explain feelings -- which is worst.) or struggling through simple sentences because I'm usually quite good with words.
I didn't talk to any of my peers at middle school for two years (after that I skipped high school and did [and continue to do] a combination of college and home schooling). I found them to be annoying and immature.
How about choosing to be mute? I have done this several times in certain situations. I find it easier just to write down my questions on a piece of paper and give them to people. Sometimes they write down the answers for me.
Maybe they think I am deaf. They treat me a whole lot better than just if I am being my autistic self. If I take a long time to answer a question or I "echo", it seems to annoy people.
I wish everyone knew how to sign. I want to learn.
I've tried a couple times to go mute, but my parents respond viciously and sometimes violently to it, so I gave up.
I do like not talking much of the time, but I've never gone phsically mute when I wanted to be talking. I do sometimes have trouble putting together more than a few words, though.
[quote=Fruitcake]
"Then I went into psychosis because of the medication I was on for anxiety. Slowly people disappeared and now I am pretty much alone. I still have the small number of friends I had before but my work colleagues were not all my friends as I thought and that hurt no one asks me out anymore."
How horrendous that this happened to someone! What was the medication that caused the psychosis and the dosage?
Maybe you have other allergies, environmental ones.
When I'm in an emotionally turbulent state, whether ecstatic, anxious, or distraught, my verbal abilities deteriorate rapidly. Within minutes, I go from speaking relatively normally and articulately to forgetting or mispronouncing simple, basic words, mixing up pronouns and tenses or dropping them entirely, repeating the same phrase(s) over and over extremely quickly or in a sing-song-y voice and finally not being able to speak coherently at all. It's not mutism, though.
Usually, I'm sort of aware that it's happening, but I don't always know the extent of it until it's pointed out to me.
( An example: "Oh! It was, it was, it was the book! That...book! With the, the thing on the thing. Cover! Yes. Yesyesyes. And so it was. And it was good. It was good. It was, it was, it was, it was, it was, 'twas and 'twas, it was. That thing. Um. Aaagh! Not again! Daaaaghahaha!")
I sound like a moron sometimes.
When I'm in an "aspie meltdown" type state, I literally cannot speak. I know what I want to say, but I can't control my mouth and throat enough to say things. Other than that I tend to be quite verbose.
You start some really interesting post discussions Seven.
Hrick is mute. I found your comment interesting though
Seven wrote: "ALWAYS if i am too upset or excited, i cannot form words or read, for example. " since when little it was the exact opposite for Hrick. he spoke quite clearly
but only when extremely relaxed or extremely excited. You would hear something once then never again. Two words a month was a lot. I still remember a a sensory integrative eval that involved a ton of vestibular stimulation where in he actually spoke a record 4 times in imitation of what the OT's said. He used to love to play with sounds though and was always stimming off them. At age 3 we were in a very bad car crash and he suffered traumatic brain injury to his speech center. Since then his sounds are extremely gutteral and he has severe oral praxis. He can get out certain short sayings like "may I please have" or yes/no with minimal prompting, but for all intensive purposes I would consider him mute. To be frank, relative to his needs, he communicates quite well without ever uttering a word.
Prior to reading your post I had never heard of mutism occuring involuntarily for someone who could already speak. A good thing to have learned.
Here is what Hrick wrote when asked that question by a bunch of OT college students Notice the NT students saw communication as being important relevant to expressing feelings. i thought that really telling.
In another writing hrick suggested that autists communicate mostly for entirely different purpose, mostly as matter of necessity, when in need of something.
Anyhow, he answered their question and then some:
Question 1: What is one thing you want everyone to know about what it is like to not be able to speak about what you are feeling?
Asking is ( i.e. reflects )your sense of what is important. Just to communicate takes so much effort both physically and emotionally that to share my thoughts or emotions as an autist, they are not so important. I do not have the connectedness of emotion you do. Only the emotions are extreme or delayed. Question for you – Do you do things based on how it feels? To do something weird to you is enjoyable for me. People think it is about becoming normalized. It is not. It is about learning a foreign culture. Practicing only a superficial image of what is normal. My normal is not your normal. Someone asked about what is the hardest part of autism. That has been at the heart of it. I have spent years trying to decide the nature of my autism. Whether it is what I have as a disability or who I am as a person. Autism is a different way of being. To be in the world robs me of my connectedness with self. Please understand, I want to live and function in your world as much as any normal person, but the cost is far more for me. To put my senses in play excites my system to point of frenzy at times. When young I would disassociate, my mom calls it, just to escape the onslaught of my senses. To touch something and melt into it as my senses experience things leaves you lost in space. Someone asked what is best about OT. It is learning to feel yourself as separate. That is what will allow me to still stay me in your world.
To see hrick work so hard in speech , forcing himself to try and get the words out..... it is hard for me to understand why anyone would actually want to become mute.
Mom of hrick
Mom of hrick: It is because some people can get the words out, but the effort wears them down day by day. It is the difference between a paralyzed person using a wheelchair and a person with severe stamina issues using a wheelchair. The person with severe stamina issues may be able to walk, but it will be painful and draining and they will not be able to do anything else but walk and their health might decline as a result of walking too much until they have to spend days in bed every time they walk somewhere. A paralyzed person (particularly one who is very identified with able-bodied norms, I'd add, since most I've talked to aren't big on the idea of walking again as a priority in their lives) might say "I can't imagine why anyone would want a wheelchair if they could walk," but then the paralyzed person in that instance has perfectly fine stamina and is in good health and so forth and doesn't understand that the other person can be more productive and healthier and get more exercise and spend less time in bed if they use a wheelchair.
I had a few words as a young child and then lost them. I regained speech but it was an exercise in BSing the way some people BS their way through school without understanding what they're doing. My receptive language was very bad compared to expressive. And speech did to my brain the same thing that three days of a conference does to my brain today. It was one of the most overloading things I did.
It started cutting out more and more when I was a teenager, and by the time I was in young adulthood it got to where I can barely use it at all, I have some echolalic stuff but it's not functional speech. I don't miss speech. If it comes back, fine, but I'm not waiting around for it. It was hell. Just because it's what's normal doesn't mean everyone's brain is cut out for it. Mine isn't, and my brain has made that abundantly clear to me. Having actually experienced it, and the severe pain and extremes of misunderstanding that resulted from it, I don't miss it. As Tito once said, "Being mute is better than distortions." I have an alternate means of communicating and that is good enough for me, even with tendonitis that can get really bad and other joint problems and such making typing painful, typing still does not wreak havoc on my understanding of the world and pain and stuff the way speech did. Speech was like dropping an atom bomb into all other areas of my brain, particularly comprehension.
Wanted to add that I have experienced inability to communicate what I want to say (including, ironically, while able to speak, but being trapped behind non-communicative echolalia) and that truly is a problem. But what I strive for is communication in whatever form it takes. I don't strive for speech in particular, because that's a form, not a function, and I'm interested in the function of communication no matter whether the form is more typical or not. I've had typical form (speech) without function (communication), and I've had function (communication) without typical form (speech), and I know which I prefer.
The problem with "selectively mute" is that it already has a meaning that is heavily tied to anxiety. Which is fine if you are mute because of anxiety, but does not cover people like me, who when I could speak at all, did so intermittently, but anxiety was not really the primary factor in whether I could or could not speak at any given time.
hypochondriac668:
Judging asperger activity with second language acquisition is difficult. However, your experience is similar to mine when I studied in Japan. I almost found Japanese easier to communicate in. I can tell you though, as your aquisition increases, that ease goes away and you encounter problems communicating again.
I found the same thing to an extent, too.
I have another theory. Possibly it is easier to speak when that which we learn has a definite "rote" basis. ie. the kind of language which gets picked up through drills etc.
as in the very early beginner stuff. For example,
"Biiru wo nomimasu"
"Onigiri wo Tabemasu"
"Umi ni ikimasu"
-- So certain catch phrases become easier to communicate fluently than the kind of sentences one is expected to be able to patch together as language acquisition increases. Are we, then, more suited to "drill-speaking" than others may be?