The Wordsmith
All I said was
“The fence is touching my van.”
He took those six words,
heated them over fiery coals,
put them on his anvil,
beat them,
reshaped them,
until they weren’t my words at all.
Then he plunged them into icy water
so I couldn’t change them back.
I had only stated an observation,
“The fence is touching my van.”
That’s all.
Linda Hanson Denmark – 2008
Communication is very difficult for autistic people, whether they have verbal speech or not. It seems that there are some rules of communication that in my nearly sixty-nine years of learning human speech, I have not yet figured out. The incident above happened when my husband was directing me as I backed up and when I got out of my van, I noticed it was against the barbed wire fence. There was no anger involved on my part. I simply made an observation out loud, which I would have done had he been present or not because I routinely make observations out loud even to myself.
I am still puzzling over what happened and ten years have now passed. Multiply that by the thousands of other times my words have not come out according to the rules of human speech that I do not understand, and it becomes rather obvious why I get overwhelmed with verbal conversation and revert to talking about dogs.
When I was a child, I was able to recite long poems, sing songs, repeat what someone else said the exact way they said it, but I was not able to communicate as expected by adults. I did not and still do not understand the unwritten rules. Perhaps if they were written rules, I could work it out but I doubt even then it would be a natural flow of speech. I think these are rules that babies figure out and naturally learn but apparently for many autistic people, that does not happen.
Eye contact, touch and people noise complicates communication. People like to all talk at once when there is a group. My brain can’t sort it out and I just get totally scrambled signals and have to ask for the person trying to talk to me to repeat what they said. It may appear that I have impaired hearing to the other person, but in reality there is just too much coming in all at once and the overload switch is activated. I may start to jerk uncontrollably and make noises. My response is to want to retreat. Often I will just find a seat and sit down and try to keep my reactions to all the light, noise and people under control. I was even confronted for being a snob because of my “standoffishness”, and because I often left early.
I saw something posted for Autism Awareness month that said “Fight Autism.” Although it is a daily fight for those of us struggling with autism in whatever way our personal struggle affects us, I prefer to think in the sense of “Understand Autism.” If people who do not have the struggles with communication were able to understand the struggles we have, expectations could change. Communication would be a whole lot easier if I did not feel like I am going to fail every time I try to say something because it is misunderstood simply because I don’t know how to communicate the difference between an observation and a complaint.
The fence was touching my van. That’s all.