#nonverbal autistic

[clownrecess]

It is not inappropriate for AAC users to have acsess to swear words.

My peers started swearing at around age 10, and if that is what language the speaking people of that age are using, nonspeaking people have the same right.

Not giving us acsess to the same type of language as our peers feels alienating, it doesn't let us communicate with the same language and terms our peers and friends do. We are not babies. We are not stupid. We are the same as our speaking peers. Just because you can sometimes control what language we use, doesnt mean you should.

[birdofmay]

Important: If a person on Tumblr says that somebody else writes your posts for you, and wants you to prove that you write everything on your own:

Don't respond. Don't upload a video of you typing or using your AAC device. Block that person, or ask someone to block them for you.

They won't listen to you and you can't convince them. They're just mean. It's spam. Really, just ignore them.

Here's a long post I wrote about that today, in case you're curious:

[perplexingluciddreams]

sometimes i live so much inside my own head that i forget i am actually nonverbal on the outside of me

of course nonverbal affects the inside of my brain too, but i am used to that because i live in there always

there is just no need to out-loud talk inside the brain, so it doesn't occur to me! until someone is physically near me and i am thinking something and i think it loud and still they don't respond... why??

...oh. they don't live in the inside of my brain like me!

only then do i remember; i can't actually just tell them with out-loud talking words, and i either scramble for another way to say it, or just give up 🤷🏻‍♂️

it can be quite funny sometimes though, if i take a while to get to the realisation that they can't know what i am thinking inside my own brain 😂🤣

[arquaticdreamer]

New bluey communication cards

ID:

1. Silly picture of Bingo with phrase "I'm unreliably/Nonspeaking" on white background and blue border

2. Pink poodle bluey character waving hi with "my name is Cloud, I use He/They Pronouns" on white background and blue border

3. Short navy and grey puppy from bluey with blue tutu on stimming with phrase "I need space"

4. Bluey with mouth agape and hands close to mouth with phrase "I'm struggling to talk" white background blue border

5. Bingo fallen to knees and hands in air phrase says "I'm overstimulated"

6. White and brown girl puppy with teal glasses from bluey with phrase that says "Caregiver: Mizu" and blured out phone number below l. White background blue border

End ID:

[ichverdurstehier]

So I'm writing an autistic character who's currently having a speech loss episode due to extreme trauma (trust me you don't want to know) how should I describe the noises he's making and his attempts at communicating? There's no AAC devices bc they haven't been invented yet. Nonverbal autistics and semiverbal autistics of Tumblr, what sounds do you make when you're trying to communicate but your mouth doesn't work? My strain of autism doesn't involve speech loss so I cannot use my own experiences

[crimzonquazar]

Seeing as how spinning the revolver chamber after reloading does nothing since there’s no empty chambers, there are 3 possibilities as to why Gordon does it

1: He thinks it makes him look cool

Very possible as Gordon is a 27 year old (at least mentally as of hl2) nerd

2: He likes the way it sounds

Also possible as his lack of talking could be a sign of nonverbal autism, and thus he spins the chamber as a form of auditory stimming

Or 3: Both at the same time

This is the most possible, and is definitely why he does it, why? you may ask, because I say so, now so long, and thank you for reading

[thecommunalfoolboy]

I don’t care how good the games are I’m not playing Zelda till they stop being cowards and make Link use sign

[bee-fox]

i sometimes feel like I'm in a sort of weird alone area. my fluency of english is very much a mask. if i drop it i don't talk at all like this, instead very stereotypically for a nonverbal autistic. you can see my in my auslan.

but it makes me feel kind of alone but also something i can't really drop? i wish i could drop said mask because it hurts, it feels tight, but also i get scared.

scared of being stereotypical, scared of not being understood, scared of feeling even more alone.

a friend in my communities sometimes types errantly, their words muddled and letters jumbled. that makes me feel better though. they are really smart and i value them a lot so it makes me feel less alone.

i also want to be a writer, my stories and ideas and worlds i cherish a lot, and want to share them. but I can never find the right words to share across the emotions and the thoughts to bring it to reality.

and even with the mask, my words can feel jumbled and hard to understand for some people.

[clownrecess]

Disablity aids are super cool.

You, and your aids look awesome, pretty/handsome/pleasant, and super rad.

I often feel embarrassed for wearing ear defenders, or for having a tablet harnessed around me but like?? That isnt what it is!! It is a disability aid. It is an AAC device. It is how I communicate, and there is no reason to he embarrassed by that.

[silly-centipede]

Y'all I can't with my friends /pos

I went nonverbal at school and they didn't even care, they just patiently waited for me to type my responses to the conversation, and when I didn't have my laptop with me they'd only ask yes/no questions or do a "do x for this answer, y for that answer" thing.

And when they asked why I wasn't talking and I said it was selective mutism they didn't even ask they just said "ah that's okay" and continued the conversation. And when I talked again they just said "oh you're talking again" and didn't try to assign morality or anything to it.

This is the kind of understanding I need in my life

[perplexingluciddreams]

A “brief” overview of my communication journey:

My verbal communication was always limited to echolalia and scripts (by scripts, I mean pieces of different echolalia that I stuck together to create a new phrase, or longer several-sentence delayed echolalia. But I didn’t learn to do this until I was at least 9 years old). I also had very limited control over what my mouth said - I would regularly hear my mouth say something I completely disagreed with, then had to watch in panic and confusion as the people around me reacted as if it was something I actually thought.

I used to request things that I didn't even want. "I want..." statements were banned in my house because they were "rude". “I want never gets!” I had stuck as a script for the longest time, even involuntarily saying it when other children said an “I want…” phrase.

I was given examples of how to request things by my parents. I used "I would like...", "Can I have... please", etc. But this didn't give me a reliable way to ask for what I wanted - I could only ask for things I had a script for. So I was limited to a handful of foods and objects that as I grew older, I had less and less interest in.

Saying "please" and "thank you" was drilled into me so much that I would often say it at the end of other unrelated scripts because it got "stuck" there by my mouth, without my permission. I got laughed at for this a lot.

I would say "yes" when I meant no, I couldn't reject things because I didn't have a script for saying "no". And I had been told to be polite so many times that it was a concrete rule in my mind - breaking a rule was worse than anything else. Saying "no" was rude, according to the adults around me - if another child said "no" to something, they were told off by a teacher or their parent. I didn't understand tone of voice so I thought it was the thing they were saying that was wrong.

As I got older, and became more aware that other people seemed to have more control over their voices and could say what they wanted (my general awareness of people and my surroundings definitely played into my struggles with communication, but I won’t elaborate on that here) I would sometimes sit in my bedroom and attempt to read aloud from a book, or write a sentence and read it aloud. To my confusion and upset, it would come out garbled with sounds mixed up, words missing, sometimes no sound coming out of my mouth at all. I couldn't make intelligible speech with my own words AT ALL.

I managed to teach myself to manually make some sounds, mostly vowel sounds, by moving my tongue around whilst making sounds with my vocal cords. But clearly this was not enough for using spontaneous speech as communication. Not to mention, any time I even considered trying to get my OWN words out (with speech, writing - even drawing pictures, signs), all words and scripts I knew just disappeared from my mind.

The only time I could even slightly get my emotions out was through movement - I used to throw myself backwards onto my bed repeatedly, bang my head with my hand, pull my hair, spin around in circles. I now know these would be called "stimming", but at the time I used it more for expressing myself. I also had other repetitive movements that I did almost constantly without even realising what I was doing, but I considered the expressive movement to be a different thing entirely at the time.

It took me years to get my own words out, and that was only once I managed to break down (spoken AND written, and both connected) language into individual words and learn the meanings, then learn to build it back up again. (And, this could only happen after I’d lost most of my out-of-control scripted speech. AAC with symbols helped me break down language in this way, because each word has a separate button and I was forced to learn to form sentences without an already-there structure to fall back on).

In order to do this, first I must take the long string of noises, and break it down into words. Then I must take those words and process the meaning of them individually. The biggest challenge, and the thing that takes the most time, is building the sentence back up.

Words often change meaning when they're strung together, and this is the part where that meaning tends to disintegrate into nothing, for me.

I have to build an abstract "picture" of what the words mean in my head. With very complex language, or a lot of language at once, this can take me hours, days, or even weeks.

Written language is a lot easier to process - firstly, the "string of noises" part is completely eliminated from the equation. Secondly, I see written words as entire shapes. Shapes, symbols or signs connect much more strongly to their meaning, in my head.

I learned to write by hand before I could type, because writing by hand is just copying the shape of a word. I hadn't yet learned to break down a word into it's individual characters and sequence them in the right order, not to mention finding the letters on the keyboard. My spelling has always been fantastic because of my tactile memory for words - and I say tactile instead of visual, because I don't "see" anything in my head, but the shapes of words are something solid that I feel I can touch, hold, grab on to.

But typing was a completely different thing, because even though I could recognise and read words in a typed print, it took longer for me to understand how to put letters together in the correct order to create words using a keyboard. The motor plan for typing was much more difficult for me to learn, but now I have that skill it's invaluable to me in terms of communication.

It took me a little while longer to realise that a keyboard gave me the opportunity to use my own words from my own mind, rather than whatever my mouth (or brain, when writing - I had different written scripts than verbal scripts, though, usually from books) happened to blurt out without my control.

I learned to read very early, but my understanding of language was actually quite poor - separately I could recognise the definition of one word, but when many words are put together I didn't understand the meaning of that sentence or paragraph.

The feeling of being able to put my own thoughts into written words like this, and read them back, is such a rush of power. I can have a concrete, physical impact on the world now that I can use a keyboard and get all the things in my head out there. It becomes real as soon as it's outside of me.

I remember that "comprehension" (answering questions on a written passage - we learned to answer the questions in a certain way, with a “blueprint”) in school really helped me with the breaking down of sentences and rephrasing them. Even though at the time, it just felt like it added to my out-of-control scripted speech, it gave me a skill that has been incredibly useful to me in the long term.

Getting to this point, where I can express myself fluently and eloquently through written language, took so much time and work, and still takes all my energy to write something as long as this. I am so grateful for the genuine communication I have now. It took many sessions, over months, to write this in its entirety. I wrote it in separate chunks, all trying to express similar things, then fitted them together and altered some sentences to make it flow better. (Of course with lots of editing to fix my grammar and my tendency to repeat the same sentence structure over and over - I still use my “blueprints” while writing, it’s the only way I can form complex long sentences like this one).

In order to communicate a memory or past experience in words, I had to have been actively translating (or attempting to translate) my abstract thoughts into language at the time.

If I wasn't or couldn't do this at the time it was happening, those experiences, thoughts, emotions, etc. are almost impossible to describe in language now.

And translating my brain takes so much energy and effort, and relies on me being able to understand what is happening and what I'm thinking and feeling. I more often than not don't comprehend my own mind - if this is the case, then of course I can't explain it to someone else.

It still takes so much time, effort and energy to get my thoughts out like this, and I’m very proud of the progress I’ve made. Even just learning to use Tumblr and posting on here as regularly as I can manage (plus reading other people’s words about similar experiences, or even very different experiences), has increased my ability to express myself and the vocabulary I’m able to access.

[arquaticdreamer]

ID: P2G AAC app tablet 6x10 with message bar saying, “Cloud feel so frustrated!” End ID

Autistic Vent: Part of being high support needs autistic is always feeling frustrated and angry about just generally everything that can’t do or things like Abl**sm and things that are inaccessible to us (especially as wheelchair users, and mobility users). Needing to use mobility aids should never be something that should be shamed for or made more difficult but Cloud just today had to deal with disabled inaccessibility at the local Denny’s Diner cafe with only one disabled parking slot and someone had already parked there, there were no other disabled parking spots but that single one user and so Caregiver had to park farther away from the front because the disabled parking was farther away from the front door of the diner and everywhere else was too far away to be wheeled. Cloud dealt with this poised and gracefully and just really wanted to sit down and have breakfast and thankfully the experience inside the Denny’s was much better than the actual parking problem. But still there needs to be more renovation for disabled parking places, and accessibility. That includes closer disabled parking and not just ONE!

[ichverdurstehier]

Nonverbal autistics of Tumblr, why do you guys use third person language so often? It seems to be a very common thing

[pixierainbows]

so many people using words badly . like nonverbal “ moments “ … nonverbal means can not talk AT ALL .

if person have moments can not speak , that is being ( occasionally , or frequently ) losing speech . is NOT same as be nonverbal . please to stop “ diluting “ or “ reclaiming “ or appropriating words like nonverbal . is have specific meaning .

words matter . especially for people what can not communicate easily .