Arquatic Paul: “Arquatic thinks”
Most of the time my hyperphantasia tricks me into thinking i can talk outloud just due to how quiet being totally nonverbal i actually am. but its only in the headspace its so odd to me every single time i have a dream where I’m still semiverbal like how I was growing up its such an odd experience and then I wake up with imposter syndrome thinking I’m still semiverbal and then i realize oh yeah I’m still totally actually nonverbal I can’t do that anymore like I used to. Nonspeaking later in life is really odd. For me it started in early teenage years losing all functional speech and then realizing that I couldn’t speak anymore yet people still expecting me to talk for the sake of their selfish desires. And having to prove to them time and time again that I simply cannot. I was originally diagnosed in early, early childhood and no one wanted to admit that I was actually autistic even the body’s bio mom. But knowing that i did for a time in early childhood like ages 1-4 i couldn’t speak at all and then learning to talk like at age 5 finally it really drives home the fact that i had very little expressive verbal language abilities and i still to this day have very poor receptive language skills. I just naturally tune out the moment i hear someone talking to me. I often wondered if that had to do with my upbringing growing up more around dogs and wolf dogs. It’s so confusing knowing that i did eventually learn how to read fluent English but never learned how to speak fluent English throughout life stable enough.
It definitely makes a huge difference being part of a polyfragmented C-DID system when my internal monologue is much louder than my not being able to speak silence. Having an internal monologue for a full time nonspeaker is also weird because of my hyperphantasia and synesthesia having to hear my thoughts audibly hallucinating them making me go over to my caregiver and gesturing in home signs “why aren’t you answering my questions?” Only for her to tell me “I didn’t know you were signing to me or asking me a question on your AAC.” Turns out i was never communicating verbally i was asking her the question in my head in my internal monologue. So trippy.
