Sometimes I see people on here who want to be good allies to nonverbal autistics, but at the same time don't understand nonverbal autism at its core.
Most of us, who are nonverbal "from birth", struggle with language, to communicate, and to understand complex concepts. That's why we never learned to speak at all, ever.
But their strategy is to "hand us the mic" and ask "What are some misconceptions about nonverbal autism you'd like to discuss?" and expect us to respond.
"Misconceptions" is an abstract concept. Most of us can't just come up with an answer; my mind, for example, goes completely blank when I read this.
I wanted to talk about allies assuming that our brain works similar for at least 2 weeks, but it's only now that I am able to write something. 2 weeks!
Sure, there are autistics who can't speak due to apraxia, and who don't struggle with language otherwise, apart from the "not being able to speak with their mouth" part. But that's rare.
Even my ability to express myself well is rare. I am not your average nonverbal autistic. I am very skilled compared to the rest of us.
One thing about "never learning to speak" is that most of us really really struggle with language, and with understanding big words and topics. Not everyone, but many of us. That's why most of us aren't on social media.
Whenever I write "educational" posts, my inbox is flooded with follow up questions I just can't answer without help. Because most of the time I don't understand the text. I regularly have to close my inbox because people assume that I can process the text and respond like everyone else can. But having these abilities is an exception within autistics who never learned to speak from the very beginning. It seems normal, but those people just are the loudest. Because they're on social media and love to participate in discussions.
Most of us can't do that.
I'm glad that I made some speaking friends here who made an effort to understand us thoroughly, and they now often repeat what we think and want "but louder". Listen to them, most of us can't advocate for ourselves. They're not speaking over us, they're helping us to communicate without draining our energy.
And for everything else I have some posts linked in my pinned post because I can't just participate in discussions.
