I amAutistic, yes I am am a nonspeaking verbal and Yes I use AAC apps to communicate! Hello, So I wanted to share som
Saoirse Tilton's blog post from 2014 on verbal ability, expectations, and AAC.
Excerpt:
The more I used speech and went to speech therapy the more verbal I became. As i became more and more verbal i became more and more detached from my environment and the world around me and from my sensory thinking. As i started to lose my sensory thinking some of my senses in fact began to feel a bit duller. however this did not stopped me from having sensory issues or becoming sensorially overloaded. i still have many sensory issues. they are just different now. i have the issues without the sensory connections I used to have. in losing the sensory thinking i lost a vital part of myself. The world has become even more frustrating, more confusing. I am also losing my ability to think visually the way I used to. The more I use words for communication the more I use them to think and the more the visuals fade away. I have become less able to navigate my environment. Some days verbal thinking is like a plague of a thousand voices screaming inside my head that I can't shut off. A jumbled mess of verbal thoughts with no clear point. As though my brain is spasming from the strain of thinking verbally and nothing I do will make them stop.