Niceness Conditioning

Okay, now that I'm not eating soup while typing:

The "able to repeat" seems to be just me being overloaded. The "mouth not working at all" has an element of fear to it, some sort of panic or doubt or worry or something.

One time I said something and my own voice scared me and I went nonverbal. I'm good at life.

 

Sayings and memes are much more accessible than the conscious engineering of words into concepts.

 

Thing! Sometimes I can´t make mouth noises, but sometimes making words is hard. Like now. Which is bad when need to make words.
ETA: And sometimes they fail only on one topic, like trying to explain why thing is a problem. <= Best I could do to words the problem.

 

see, if I go nonverbal, it's all or nothing. either I can make mouth noises and words, or I can't. there is no in between.
my parents always think I'm doing this to annoy them.
one time my teacher tapped my shoulder and scared me into going nonverbal mid-class, that was great.

 

God, I feel this all really hard. I stutter and clutter, and I can't pronounce a lot of words right, and my words are all really embarrassing because of it. I used to have a lot of palilalia as a kid too, but a speech therapist trained me out of most of it - I'd be repeating my words under my breath to try and figure out if I'd gotten them right, I think? At least, that's why I still do it occasionally today. I really dislike my voice and tend to refer to it as hideous harpy screeching.

Like... I'm a lot better at speaking than I was, I can generally participate in a skype call (so long as audio quality isn't bad because that sets off my inability to process words as words, which I... think is audio processing stuff but I can't remember the words), I can talk in my therapy sessions and to my housemates and partner. But I still flub my speech checks often enough that sometimes I'm just too embarrassed to try and say a particular thing, or sometimes anything at all. That's a different feeling to being unable to say a thing but it still sucks.

I used to speak some Auslan when I was a teenager, but I've forgotten it all (except for a few words, I can still express 'kitty!!!', that was a very important skill for me to retain); I'd like to learn it again because it feels like it'd be so useful when my throat doesn't work, but that would involve being around People, and I can't deal with being around People very well. :(

 

the other issue for me is that I tend to talk really fast, I think because I'm anxious and want to get the words out as quickly as possible, but then people mishear/don't hear me, and ask me to repeat it, and that's always....no.

 

What´s an anya-ism? Aside from being mistrustful of beer.

 

Well that explains why I thought she was great

 

This is very eye-opening for me. All of this is very familiar ground. I would describe myself as a thoroughly verbal person (I am a customer service manager, I talk to people all day and train underlings to do the same). But I definitely get moments or evenings where I just don't have the mental resources to word properly anymore, and I babble and ramble and grope for the right word.

Related to this, ever since a young age I've thought I had hearing problems, because it's hard to understand what people are saying. But hearing tests have always turned out just fine and it made me feel a little crazy - and the fact that I can often notice very faint or slight sounds, even if I'm having to ask my moirail to repeat herself a third time - maybe that would make more sense as an auditory processing issue? That might also explain why I basically never understand the lyrics in songs, and regard vocals as just another instrument throwing pretty but nonsensical syllables around with occasion recognizable words mixed in... (and rap music is tiring to listen to bc it is so lyrically focused - holy shit is everything making sense? Can somebody spot me on this, have I just maybe learned something significant?)

For reference I am not diagnosed with autism but self-evaluation and online screening questionnaires consistently pout me in a "strong maybe" zone. I am amab which will be maybe relevant to this next section:

So the thing that tends to truly deplete my capacity for speech is usually when my blood sugar crashes - I'm either prediabetic or actually diabetic, I've been hiding from doctors for years so I don't know for sure. But if I let myself go too long without food, I might be out at a store or something and just feel my brain winding down. I will try to find something more balanced than just a quick sugar rush, like going to the deli counter or something, but often I wait too long and trying to speak is a huge effort. A typical example might be: walk up to deli counter, fail to notice for a few seconds when a person is asking how they can help me. Tell them "blood sugar, bad. Not coherent. Need food." I can point at a sandwich, or point at a chicken salad or something and the container I want filled and say "this, in this, please." I might be able to follow their questions, I might sadly shake my head and say something like, "sorry, brain needs food." Payment is fine (although my hands will be a little clumsy, it's still fine) and I can give them a chunk you very much" and go eat. If anybody has ever been less than cooperative, I haven't noticed in that condition. I think when that happens I kind of look like I'm on the verge of keeling over dead, so people are pretty keen to assist me. I'm also aware that "sorry, decisions are hard" is one of the phrases I can reliably use on emergency power, so I guess I get indecisive sometimes.

So that's my experience as probably-not-autistic and also as I write this I notice my blood sugar is getting good awfully low, so I will stop. (if my autocorrect were less cooperative, y'all would see how awful my typing is right now)

 

Same hat!! I'm also hypervigilant towards sounds but bad at figuring out the meaning of speech. I have to listen to songs with the lyrics in front of me if I want to be able to know what they're actually saying. Getting through Hamilton was An Adventure. For me it's a little easier if I know the person so I'm used to how their voice sounds, but when they're over the phone/skype or we're in public or if conditions are otherwise suboptimal it can still be really hard. And strangers are just... much worse, I have to focus everything on what they're saying. Watching TV can be hard, I prefer to do it with subtitles because otherwise I get really stressed about missing dialogue.

 

same hat same hat
also that sounds a looooooooooot like auditory processing disorder.

 

tbf I did have a similar issue to an extent which escalated a few years back, but I'm fairly sure that it was hearing loss related maybe?

But then I did have my ears tested and it came back fine

idk maybe it was the audio processing equivalent of the brain fog and visual snow and tinnitus I was (and to an extent still am) getting around the same time. I definitely remember a sudden shift where I couldn't understand the characters talking on tv as well. I think I've mostly fixed that in myself now, or w/e

...I forget where I was going with this but the point was I'm not autistic or anything and so yeah, but I guess it's a thing with some overlap

Same hat with being bad with picking out lyrics though, I just look up a transcript if I want to sing along.

 

Oh my gosh talking about verbal/auditory processing

So I live in Japan right now, and I work at a daycare/after school care centre. And I feel so bad because the kids talk to me and I keep not understanding them because there's so many layers of processing my brain needs to do.

Normally my Japanese conversation process is:

1. Access my Japanese vocab and grammar to decode what was said
2. If there was a word I don't know, use the context of the rest of the sentence to guess the meaning (if that fails, ask them to rephrase or grab my dictionary)
3. Access my vocab and grammar to construct a response
4. Use more words than a native speaker would to describe something I don't have the accurate vocab for, which requires more processing power
5. Rinse and repeat for the rest of the convo

But at work, I get these extra steps!

1. Differentiate between what this kid is saying and all the noises of the other kids playing
2. The kid probably speaks with the regional dialect (for some reason it's only kids and the elderly that use the regional diaclet???). Have fun trying to figure out what they're saying because you've been taught in the standard (Tokyo) dialect and the pronunciation is different and you're not okay
3. Ask the kid to repeat because you failed to decode
4. The kid sounds exactly the same
5. Try to respond as if you understood because you don't want to crush them
6. (Maybe ask one of the other teachers to repeat what the kid said if it's all going to shit)
7. REPEAT

I have the same problem at church bc it's mostly elderly people and they all have super thick [city name redacted] accents and I'm here constantly asking them to repeat and I FEEL SO BAD

 

I was just a wee thing when I lost my language processing. People what read my tumblr know that the first thing the docs said was "going deaf" then when Mom proved I could hear just fine they said "oh, then mentally retarded". In both cases it was treated as "oh well, just another problem the little freak has, no big deal".

 

Mom says she is not surprised at how much I hate doctors in general, just surprised at how often I manage to avoid telling them what I think of them. Niceness conditioning, I think :D