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prodigal-explorer · 1 year

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my speech impediment experience

as an autistic person with ehlers-danlos syndrome, as well as a premature identical twin, it was basically expected that i was going to have speech delays as a child. here is my story, and sort of my speech journey!

(my speech impediment story is not the definitive story of the speech impediment experience. do not use my story as an end-all-be-all of authority, please!)

my mom was expecting to have me and my twin sister in late march, but something happened, and we came out very early, on january 30. since we were so premature and we were identical twins (we came from one egg that split), we came out very small (around 4 pounds each), and we had medical complications from the get-go.

being twins, we spent a lot of time together. and as we started to learn that our mouths could make specific sounds that meant specific things, the first people we tried this type of communication out on was each other, naturally. this led to the two of us developing our very own nonsense language.

for a very long time, my sister and i refused to speak in any other way besides our own language. it took us longer to reach milestones such as our first words as a result of this. we had to go to speech therapy to unlearn the habits we picked up while speaking in our language, since being babies, we didn't understand how to use our mouths effectively.

for a long time, my sister and i had speech therapy. we both struggled with a lot of articulation errors, and we both tended to speak quickly, which led to some stuttering issues.

we also both learned later in life that we likely have some form of dyspraxia, which explains a lot of the issues we were having with figuring out how to move our mouths the correct ways.

we were lucky that our speech impediments didn't fully follow us into adulthood, but for a lot of our early childhood, we still struggled with a lot of vocal things that our peers had already mastered. i have a video from when we were around eight years old, and my nickname for my sister is "madi", but instead of actually pronouncing it correctly, i would call her "m-ee-adi" instead, adding an "ee" sound where there wasn't supposed to be one.

we went to speech therapy until around third or fourth grade, and from there, we had learned enough skills to where our speech impediments were no longer getting in the way of our lives.

nowadays, i still occasionally struggle with certain things vocally. i am an actor, so diction is very important for me to be understood onstage, but i struggle a lot with making my words understandable. i often have to slow down and start over, and i get a lot of "what? i didn't catch that", even when i speak slower than my usual quick pace. speaking clearly takes a lot of effort for me, even years after all that speech therapy. for some people, speech impediments don't fully go away, even if they do get significantly more manageable.

that is my speech impediment journey! i wish i could have been more detailed and scientific with it, but i don't remember very much from my childhood period, and due to a lot of other complications, stuff like causes are very murky because a lot of different things could have caused my speech impediments.

i hope this helped educate anyone who wants to learn more about speech impediments!

#ez's life #not sanders sides #speech impediment #speech impediments #personal story #personal stuff #personal post

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perfectfeelings · 1 year

Quote

They burned the bridge, then ask why I don’t visit.

Ugo Eze