Having verbal shutdowns is an interesting thing because sometimes its In Theory I Could Speak, However There Is A Brick Wall In My Throat Refusing To Let The Words Out and sometimes its Words Do Not Exist Because The Thought To Word Translator Is Malfunctioning and sometimes its If I Add The Sound Of My Voice To The Cacophony I Will Explode and sometimes its You Interrupted Me Several Times So Now Speech Is Forbidden and sometimes its I Just Haven't Talked In A While So It Will Take Some Time To Adjust and sometimes its a mixture of all of the above.
(speaking from personal experience)
She has ocular albinism (made a separate post about this) so she is light-sensitive and has a hard time seeing distant objects. Because of this, she relies a lot more on wakfu sensing than her siblings
Doesn't really engage in a lot of adult™️ activities, including drinking alcohol. She gets picked on for it, but she just doesn't have an interest in doing those things (this is part of why she was called "innocent" by her siblings)
Can not handle horror movies. She will get incredibly jumpy
Has insomnia and struggles to fall or stay asleep. Laying around throughout the day is usually not just leisure time, but her just genuinely being tired
Is really good with kids. She treats them with the same amount of respect she treats adults
Likes drawing and is pretty good at it. She would often paint or draw with the eliatrope and dragon children in her past lives
Likes flowers but is also a fan of carnivorous plants
Loves pretty much any animal ever. Has a soft spot for cats and moths in particular, though (she is partial to bats as well)
Used to experience verbal shutdowns a lot as a kid (it still happens as an adult sometimes when she's really stressed)
i used to be hyperverbal or at least just fully verbal when i was little. used to get verbal shutdowns often, but i could still talk a majority of the time. but i’m getting older and language is getting harder and harder. i keep not being able to find words and everything keeps not coming out right. i’m scared people are going to start noticing.
i want to try using aac but i’m scared. what if people think it’s weird? i’ve never had a hard time with words this bad before so people would definitely notice or comment. and for some reason the idea of it just feels so embarrassing even though i know it shouldn’t be. i hate that i’m embarrassed over tools that would genuinely help me
we're in an arguably similar boat and i think at some point you have to accept that your health and comfortability needs to come before anyone's version of "normal" or "necessary"
it is scary. and it sucks to be in a space that's willing to ostracize or discourage you from what makes living more accessible but fuck, idk.
there are people willing to wait for you. and ways to make your voice heard and people who will respect your right to communicate in whatever way seems fit
the world's really nice when you take care of yourself.
Verbal shutdowns are difficult. I remember back in lock-down when I inconveniently had one during an online class and physically couldn’t speak even when I wanted to, and got accused of evading working in class. I couldn’t communicate what was wrong at that moment.
I think when you’re usually verbal, verbal shutdowns are especially bad because everyone knows you *can* speak. You can speak, so why don’t you? What’s wrong with you? Why are you being ignorant?
And it’s such a suffocating feeling. Because you’re not trying to ignore anyone or want to do this, but you can’t speak no matter how much you try.
And you sit there, getting scolded and accused and can’t defend yourself because you can’t speak at that moment. Everyone thinks it’s on purpose because no one can fathom that someone who’s “normal” can be impaired randomly.
we used to be fully verbal. Talking as much and as often as we wanted. and sure we got tired, but talking was only hard the same way all things are hard when you are tired. We know we talked a lot. Possibly to to point where we may have been hyper verbal as a child. Or maybe we were just louder than all the other kids so to other it seemed like every word was worth more. If we had verbal shutdowns we do not remember them. Maybe we did, and languages struggles are locked away with memories of the meltdowns we know we had.
It was in high school that we first remember having a verbal shutdown. We think after a meltdown though we have blocked that out if it was one.
We took a notebook with us and wrote what we wanted to say. This was our first time using AAC. We had the words for our experience then. Some words at least. Though they may have been the wrong ones.
We are not sure if the next memory is part of the same one or a different one but we remember downloading a text to speech app to use. Using it and our family acting put off by it. We were driving to our uncles and aunts place. Our family asked if we were going to use it around them and where clearly not impressed. Our words come back before we arrived
And that was that. Verbal but loosing words sometimes. Struggling to articulate sometimes. But only infrequent speech loss. Once a month at most.
And we didn’t have access to AAC. We had text to speech apps on our phone but we didn’t use them. Because writing worked fine. Forcing ourself to speak worked fine.
Language was ours and we used it how we wanted.
And then we went to china. And it was wonderful and amazing and so different and so much change. And after a music performance (for we were there to perform music) our words slipped out of our grasp. and this was fine. this has happened before. We wrote on paper like before but our hand was shaking and the writing was hard to read.
So we went around research different AAC. for when it happened again.
And it did. Twice more. And that was fine because it made sense why it had happened. and we know things would return to normal once we come home.
And for the most part they did.
Nothing much changed for a good while. And we worked on our AAC for when verbal shutdowns happened.
It was slow. The loss of our words. Creeping in at the edges. More verbal shutdowns, sure. But also struggling to voice thoughts. Speaking but as not as much as normal. It grew. Until we rarely have a day where talking is easy all the time. until we rarely have a day where we do not wish we could use AAC because talking is a waste of our precious energy.
We do not know if our talking will return to normal. We do not know if it will just get worse. Right now we can get though almost all of school talking fine. Right now our talking switches off mostly in safe environments. But it has started showing up in places that I thought it would not. Maybe it is just the product of not having more than 3 week off school in almost 2 years. Maybe it is fine. Maybe it will come back. Maybe it will stay like this (but “this” hasn’t been stable so we do not know what “this” is). Maybe we will lose more words. And we don’t know. And the not knowing is scary.
This doesn’t have a nice conclusion. Because we are not at the end. Because this is still very new and there is change happening and we have to wait and see. We will keep using AAC though. and hopefully soon we will be able to use it whenever we need and want to. Not just sometimes. Around specific people.
