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Thanks in advance for answering. Have a lovely rest of your day/night! Your account brings me a lot of happiness and comfort, thank you for doing what you do 😊

hi! this is very interesting of a question and i do have answers!

in addition to being functionally nonverbal, sometimes (but not all the times) i can't make any noise at all, even crying or screaming or laughing or anything. so during this i don't get any vocal tics, though i still have some breathing tics that can be loud. generally my motor tics are the most disabling aspect of my tourettes

but when my vocal chords are working and i can make noises (not speak, just meow or exclaim or whatever, and still not voluntary), i do get vocal tics and often full words or even sentences (sentences usually happen during tic attacks or meltdowns which tend to go together, they are not reflective of what i want to say and are often entirely nonsensical). the word tics are actually the same as they used to be. cat, pony, puppy, and i do sometimes tic the name of whatever im looking at/doing (book, draw, toys, etc. this isn't me communicating, again, its just a thing that happens, not in response to a question or with awareness of me doing it)

this is actually something i've been thinking about. since we try to emphasize nonverbal IS a permanent state of not being able to communicate via mouth, but also not having control over what my mouth does can be confusing to people who think nonverbal means always completely silent. hard to have to explain tics to people when they get confused or upset.

hi! my newest plushies are in fact the webkinz jr pals i got, leapfrog and catnap. but i also got this little tikiri ladybug rubber rattle toy yesterday!

So Im rather newly diagnosed with autism and I struggle with finding actually definition of terms that fully make sense to me.

For the lngest tike I thought, that special interests are also about knowing EVERYTHING (or as close as possible) about the thing too.

But I get that it doesnt have to, for example for you with plushies. You probably dont know every singoe brand in the world and when and how they came into existance etc...

And because of that its hard for me to really understand my special interests!

(There are also other words where I get what they mean but I cant figure out how to apply them to myseld)

hi! this is a very good and interesting topic to me.

i don't know everything about plushies, that's definitely true! for me my special interests don't have to do mostly with knowledge about a topic. i simply rely on them to engage with and process the world around me.

so it doesn't matter to me how much i know about plushies when i call them my special interest, since they (and collecting as a general concept) have been since i was too young to talk or read or anything! what matters to my definition for myself is that i need to constantly have access to be able to engage in anything, be it basic self care, learning to knit and sew and any other skills or topics, and being out of the house. they're really just the center to my universe.

the best way i can explain it is that if you could look inside the core of my heart, i would completely overlap with my love for plushies/my collections. there isn't a separate part of my identity that has no relation to my special interests, they are overlayed on top of my everything. the window through which i view and understand the world around me has plushies on the windowsill.