Part of being a social animal is that we communicate with each other. We live in a society, and we have to interact with other people. A lot of that communication happens through language, especially spoken and signed language.

For many of us, this language happens so freely and easily that it is as unremarkable as walking. It's something that doesn't require a lot of effort or thought and happens without pushing through it. But just as we sometimes don't have the ability to freely walk, for some of us, some of the time, words don't come out so easily.

There are some days where I don't have much capability to speak.

Usually, I won't stop talking

When I was a small child, I had trouble hearing. This was related to chronic, severe ear infections. I'd get them so badly¹, and was up many nights with severe pain. Many of my preschool memories are of my mom rocking me in this one armchair we had in our living room, helping me get some comfort and maybe some sleep. (I love you, mom. This memory is exactly the mom I aim to be with my own kids.)

Since I had trouble hearing, I also had trouble learning how to speak. I was probably producing the sounds I was hearing, but those weren't accurate sounds! So when I repeated what I heard, it came out sorta garbled. From what I've been told, I was a shy, quiet kid for a few years in elementary school.

After my hearing was largely fixed and my ear infections slowed down significantly, my spoken language improved. I had four or five years of speech therapy, which had some really frustrating moments (as any tough task does). I remember this one time when I was learning the "th" sound and I just could not hear the difference between what I was saying and what they were, but there was something!

There was this one point in speech therapy where things clicked, and I suddenly got a lot more confident and free in my speech. That was some time in fourth grade, after which the teachers remarked that it was like a spigot turned on and they couldn't get me to stop talking. I was so, so happy to be able to communicate and be understood.

I really love talking. It's taken me time to get past my shyness, which still flares up, but quiet? I'm anything but quiet.

Sometimes speech is painful

Despite liking to talk, some days it's very, very difficult. It's painful, really. Not in a physical sense: there is nothing wrong with my vocal tract. More in a psychological sense.

This has been true as long as I can remember. No one could really tell early on, because you can't tell if a small child has this difficulty when she's already having trouble actually hearing and actually speaking due to medical issues. And later on, it seems like it's just a behavioral issue: the kid is just being stubborn, she's perfectly able to speak. But it's not troublemaking, it's just that sometimes producing speech is really hard, painful, and draining.

The best way I can describe it is that it's like walking on a floor covered in glue. Normally, we can walk without any resistance. But on days when I can't talk, the floor is just covered in glue. It makes every single step unpleasant, one that you have to consider and force. By the time you make it across the room, you're drained! You probably don't even want to take a single step, once you know what you're in for, but you could if a life depended on it.

It's like that with speech for me, those days. It takes so much effort to speak out loud. But, I can push through that! And so for years I did, thinking this was just some resistance or stubbornness, or laziness. But really, it was legitimate, and not at all laziness.

When I push through those times, I make the problem worse. If I push and talk, more than a few words (sometimes even those few), I'll drain myself further and the episodes take much longer, are harder to recover from, and impact me in other areas of my life.

I've not been able to figure out a specific trigger for these episodes. That said, times of high stress and high emotion certainly seem to be likely to contribute to it. If I'm out of my element, I'm more likely to have a meltdown, and inability to speak may be part of that meltdown for me. I've noticed similar trends in a young relative of mine who has similar episodes. My experience with it has helped me help them during those episodes, and come out of them faster, since I have a guess at what it feels like for them.

How we deal with it

This section was originally going to be titled "how I deal with it," but this really deserves "we," since communication is a group activity. No solution works if those you're communicating with aren't onboard or will shame you for it.

For a long time, the way I dealt with it was: "poorly." (That joke was funny the first time I told it in therapy.) But over time, by letting go of some expectations on myself and drawing from the wealth of information and tools available from the broader neurodivergence community, I've gotten a few really good tools. They don't "fix" me: they make it so that I can communicate, and they remove the pressure to speak. They fill a similar role to my glasses.

The key for my coping mechanisms here is that when I'm in my no-talking episodes, it's specific to speech. I am not hindered in written/typed language or other forms of communication. Though, physical contact is also usually unwelcome during these episodes, so some forms of communication, like light touch, are off the table.

The first thing I tried is using text-to-speech. When I was feeling pretty good, I trained the personal voice on my iPhone to use my voice. Then, when I was not able to talk, I used text to speech on my phone, and it sounded like me! This works really well sometimes. I am able to produce short phrases easily, and in a voice that's very much like my regular daily voice.

The drawback here is that it takes time to type out what I want to say. That lag time can be jarring in conversational flow, and it means speech doesn't start until I've typed the whole phrase, which is different from how we normally speak. There are a lot of tools out there for this, which can speed it up! I've not invested in those, because they're quite expensive and my episodes are infrequent enough right now that I can't justify it. I'll revisit them if that ever changes.

The other thing we do is I use written/typed text. I'm usually able to type or write, which means we can communicate without me having to speak! Just like with text-to-speech, it takes time to type, but there are two advantages. You can read the whole thing immediately upon receipt, and if I'm sitting with you, you can also read what I'm writing as I type it, which makes conversation more natural. Usually when I do this my conversation partner will speak out loud in response², so they don't have to change behavior besides reading what I say instead of listening for it.

I also use chat for meetings. I tried to do text-to-speech but ended up having trouble finding adequate Linux tooling for it and realized I was just adding an extra layer without much benefit. So instead, I use chat in meetings when I'd speak, and as long as people expect it it works well! I have done this at work and with friends, and it's worked out quite well.

One thing that has helped is having an advocate in these calls and meetings. Someone who reminds people that I said something in chat if people don't notice it is really necessary until everyone gets used to it. By now, I don't run into messages getting lost in these meetings, so I think everyone is adjusted. Sometimes, my one-on-one meetings even just end up as bidirectional chat, if neither of us wants to do a call but both of us have a few small things to chat about. Then this ends up benefiting both of us!

This is my experience

There are a lot of different ways that people can be non-verbal. I'm writing this because I think that there are probably other people who have a similar experience to me. I want this experience out there, so people can see it and relate to it, or get a lens into someone else's world.

I felt encouraged to write this when I found out that talking about this was already helpful to someone I'd shared this experience with. She was able to relate my experience to someone else's experiences, and then help them figure out how to navigate the world a little better.

Since it's my experience, other people won't have the exact same (or even similar) experiences! But it can give you a starting point toward understanding them, through communication with them, if that's helpful to you both.

Thank you to Erika Rowland and Eugenia Tietz-Sokolskaya for feedback on a draft of this post.