April 19th: Talk about speech. Are you nonverbal? Do you use AAC? What is it like if you are? If not, do you have trouble controlling the tone of your voice? Do people often misread you based on your tone (thinking you're angry when you're not for example)? Do you have trouble controlling the volume of your voice, especially when excited about something? Do you tend to speak in a monotone?
I have struggled throughout my life with speech. However, I am verbal and do not use AAC. These struggles aren't always with the physical necessity to speak, but instead the formation of language and the back-and-forth that it takes to communicate.
As said before, I have absolute pitch. So, it's quite easy for me to "lock" to a pitch and stay there. Great for singing, not so great for talking. In essence, raising and lowering my speaking pitch to express tone is not an automatic process for me. When I do try, it's difficult to get my voice to rise or fall enough to actually make the change perceptible to others and not just myself. There have been some times in my life when trying to vary my tone ended up just sounding like an improvised melody instead of locking _away_ from a pitch. (In the easiest way to explain it, locking _to_ a pitch is what you do when you sing a song. Locking _away_ from a pitch is what I have to do when conversing, in order to be perceived as more neurotypical.)
I indicate tone, therefore, by the speed of my voice and emphasis within the rhythm of what I'm saying. This leads to a misreading of my tone in many situations. Excitement, in many cases, is read as frustration or nervousness. Neutrality and exhaustion can be read as sadness. My own family - funny enough - doesn't necessarily know if I'm really excited about something unless I say it outright. My tone is simply too flat to convey emotion in the accepted or known way.
That is one of the places where Mutual Legibility breaks down: my speech is not without meaning, but it is being read through a system that is not mine.
If I'm speaking in public, I have to practice speech cadence and pitch just as much as the words themselves, just to make sure that they're legible to the crowd I work with. This leads to another part of how I experience language and communicate, which is: scripting! Scripting doesn't just include the words, but also includes the exact tone that I use. So, it's quite easy to tell (at least to me) that I've pulled a script. My scripts are often more varied in tone than improvised speech, seeing as I practice them more often and try to make them more 'typical' in fashion than my normal speech in order to stay abreast of criticism or difficulty.
But you get to the point of, well, Ritz, what are these scripts that you refer to? Anything you can imagine. Song lyrics. Readbacks from listening to air-traffic control on Channel 9 when I was flying more often. Phrases from my childhood. "We are go for launch." Even memes, sometimes, make it into my scripts. But where I do not script, and where I try to innovate new language for myself, is through the written word. Like this post.
Writing gives me the most freedom when I communicate, and I will admit it freely: the idea that people have Zoom or in-person meetings instead of Slack messages and email is absolutely disgusting to me. Consider this an engineering problem: bringing my thoughts to Zoom-quality in real time will require massive amounts of compute, which I simply do not have on board. Writing allows you to serialize instead of parallelizing the process, saving resources overall and allowing for more actual thought to take place. If you want actual thought from me _and_ the spoken word, you will not get it without long pauses for me to construct said chain of thought, or discussing a special interest, end of story.
I also experience shutdown of language faculty, especially in environments where I am overstimulated. This sometimes shows up in my written language as well. I am fortunate that it does not happen often, because it is often catastrophic. I don't have "mid-level" language easily accessible to me in general, so there are often not "simpler" ways to convey my ideas that are given to me in my brain. So when the high-level goes, I do not have anything left besides "yes" and "no."
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