Shaylabell -- The 16th, and the Three Weeks Before
To clearly lay out the happenings of the three weeks before then…
I must explain the happenings of the past three years.
In 2015, Rozaya discovered the rest of the community, including an echolalic child by the name of Amy.
In April of 2016, we all watched as Jessi and Amy split. Jessi and Amy, if they were one, would show the classic symptoms that we understand to be those of autism.
Growing up, we were kept away from peers, supposedly because of our disruptive behavior during the times we were meant to be working on school assignments.
Growing up, we were literal thinkers in many ways, and yet, somehow, we managed to outgrow it, or so we thought.
In 2016 and 2017, we began to be profoundly affected by sensory issues that I myself remember lessening by taking most of their impact from the rest of the community, until that point, when I had reached my limit.
In 2016 and 2017, we began to stim again, in an attempt to deal with our changing processing of our surroundings. We had been punished for stimming in childhood. We split as a result.
Shortly after we began to stim again, those of us who had been living in disconnection from our body began to reconnect with it through those actions, and with them came all the things that we thought were part of our past.
Hello hand flapping; hello literal thinking; hello urges to bounce in place, and skip down the hallway, and echo what we had just heard; hello sensory overload from situations that never used to bother us…or so we thought.
Being kept from our peers should not and could not have caused us to mistake jokes for seriousness at home.
Being kept from our peers should not and likely would not have contributed to our strangely concrete, overly generalized idea that because a topic hadn’t been mentioned by another, it was not acceptable to bring up that topic unless we were not around people who could reprimand us for the possible infraction.
We practiced non-literal language daily. It was called ‘daily oral language’ worksheets. We memorized them, but not all of us learned to apply those lessons to our conversations. I am one who didn’t. Now that I’m starting to share my qualities with the rest of the community, as always happens when we are working toward cooperation and sharing of memories, we’re all being affected by this issue.
Blindness will mangle your ability to see facial expressions and read body language. That much, I can agree with.
Blindness will force you to listen for tone of voice above all else, or at least, it did with many of us. We learned not to listen to the words someone said because when we did listen in that way, we would have trouble responding to their words or answering their questions in the way they were meant to be answered. Our mother said we overanalyzed because of that tendency.
Many of us does not equal all of us. Does one not find it odd that those of us who never got past the stage of memorizing and writing down and never getting to practice non-literal language are the same beings whose rediscovery has brought to our attention the fact that we never did grow out of literal thinking?
Hello, ending dissociation; hello, shock from the world; hello, truth. We are anything but overanalytical. We just process language in unusual ways and are now seeing the facts as they are, rather than trying to keep them dissociated from everyone here save for the rare few who have no other choice than to take those patterns of perception on as theirs and theirs alone.
On February 16, 2018, we were taken into the emergency room because we had a panic attack.
Our panic attack was caused by lost time. Our lost time was caused by fear. Our fear was caused by literal thinking causing a simple “how are you?” to be too vague to have a correct answer. I knew the professionals must have been on the right track when they said we had anxiety issues.
Behavior is communication. Extinguished communication leads to suppression. Suppression leads to dissociation.
Is it any wonder, then, that those of us who experience communication problems mainly have to deal with literal thinking obscuring what someone is really saying? That we resulted to acting out just to tell adults that we were stuck on a math problem, or something else completely, because we never knew if it was ok or not to tell them we were afraid of them being angry at us?
Learning to think about what others may actually be saying when their words don’t match their point caused many of us to develop downward spirals that began showing their effects in middle school; but hey, at least we were learning to be flexible. We turned the skill of finding implications into a messy art form which frequently left us in tears…and yet, no one protested; everyone thought it was normal.
I wonder when they first began to use non-literal language with us. No, I wonder how long it took us to suppress and mask over our own understanding of English…and how many times our father had to ask us why we were so serious…and how many times we would force ourselves to laugh at a joke we didn’t get…and how many times we made those same jokes in return…before the whole act of passing as something we now realize we aren’t became so natural to us that, for years, we knew no differently, for the most part.
I don’t have all the answers. Many professionals can’t give me a direct one. Whatever it is that’s happening to us as we connect what should have been connected a long time ago, it isn’t something we’re creating for attention’s sake. Whatever’s caused it, whatever label most closely fits our experiences, whatever the ideas of people who haven’t lived through them may be, we know that even if our way of processing language and the world around us changes forever, it will ultimately be for the best. I just hope that when this particular integration of qualities is over with, people will actually hear us out instead of getting on our case for stimming or taking things exactly as they are said. After all, these things, too, are a part of all of us.