Edited to add: Just after I typed this reply, I saw on a public discussion group, a line that went, “People often misinterpret Aspie rebuttals and explanations (normally detailed and thoughtful) as defensiveness.” That sounds very accurate for how I’m interpreted with my tendency to go on and on. (Some of which is because I feel like I’m circling a topic without being able to say what I mean, and that if I just circle it long enough, in enough detail, people will see where I’m pointing. And sometimes the more exhausted I get the longer and more repetitive I get.)

Thank you for your detailed and richly textured explanation. It has made things clearer.

I didn’t intend to make any assumptions about you and didn’t think I was doing so. My observations about you were the result of thoughtful consideration of what you had written earlier in this blog entry.

By your being argumentative I meant that you give long and detailed replies to posts, on blogs or discussion forums, with which you strongly disagree because they are opposed to your ethical values and/or they are inaccurate. I didn’t mean that you like arguing for its own sake. Maybe argumentative was the wrong word.

One trouble I have with language – in whatever medium – is that I’m afraid that I might, without meaning to, communicate something ‘wrong’ which would offend the other person. That is not meant as a criticism of your reply to my previous comment. I don’t know if you are taking it as a criticism. Therefore I think that it is better for me to keep quiet.

This sentence: “The act of producing and understanding language at all hinders the expression of my natural personality traits, which is why I value the friendships I have that do not require much conversation”, strongly resonates with me. My true personality is deeper than language which expresses it only imperfectly.

There is no way of questioning it if you don’t know anything other than that way of doing things. I do remember loathing speech for as long as I can remember trying to use it. If I’d had a way of questioning what was going on, my communication skills would have had to have been far better than they actually were.

What I had for a long time was a growing sense that almost nobody knew who I was.

The problem is that this is usually taken in a different and far more metaphorical way than I mean it in. I don’t mean some sort of existential angst about the separation of one person from another, and the inability to really “know” anyone (which may have existed too at points, as it seems to for almost every teenager, but wasn’t the bulk of my problem).

I mean specifically that even most people who’d consider themselves close to me, did not know some of my most basic likes and dislikes. They did not know how I felt about just about anything. And all of this not in terms of intensity or anything, just in terms of facts people couldn’t know about me because of the way speech developed for me — a hodge-podge that only sometimes even at the best times, reflected anything about the reality of what I was experiencing.

And people would think I cared about subjects that I didn’t care about. That I had opinions that were not mine. And so forth. Not everything, because I was able to show my interest in some ways, and did have limited abilities to sometimes say or write things pertaining to what I meant. But there was so much noise in the signal that this wasn’t particularly accurate unless you could read me better than most people did.

And I had no way at all of correcting this. I had no method of walking up to someone and telling them what I was actually thinking or feeling any any given time, although I did have plenty of stock phrases for the purpose.

I guess I still have some limitations in that area, they’re just not as pronounced. I have far less noise now to override the signal, and I have ways of shutting off the bits of the automatic noise-generator that still function (including beginning to get really strict about how, when, and why I will and will not answer questions).

But what I do still have is ability to talk about a limited number of subjects compared to the scope of what I am able to think about. My best friend once told me that she thinks I have a lot of detailed knowledge somewhere in my brain, but that I have very bad ability to access it.

But that if someone were somehow able to look inside my head they would see something very different than what makes it out of my fingers. They would see something like huge pockets of minutely detailed information on a huge variety of subjects. And then they would see that only one or two parts of those pockets of information is really able to be accessed.

I don’t know why it is, but I do have a couple of friends who seem to understand this about me. They hold entire conversations with me about other topics that I never talk about on my blog and would never be able to. Or we interact in other ways pertaining to other things. And somehow they register my understanding, and take it seriously.

But most of the time I have no way to indicate this understanding. I don’t know how I indicate it with these few friends, either.

So things have improved, but there are still elements of before, there are large portions of what I think about that there is no way to say. But there’s less interference.

And I know that a lot of people really do have one particular focused area of knowledge. But I think some of us, like me, have more areas of knowledge, but one particular focused area of communication of and/or access to that knowledge at any point in time, and possibly one particular focused area of obvious learning at one point in time. I’ve noticed that I can’t control what that area is, either, and that the one I have access to words for, and the one I am currently learning, are not always the same one.

And I do think, strongly, that there’s some kind of ‘many ways of being autistic’ thing going on here that’s causing some of the communication trouble between me and Philip on this thread, but I doubt it’s a division that has a name yet.

That’s pretty much exactly how I experienced speech growing up. And it didn’t even occur to me to question this impression when I was younger — I didn’t know what communication was supposed to consist of and feel like, so I didn’t have any basis for comparison. Plus, the people around me generally had some theory at the ready to explain my “difficulties” — the ones I got a lot were that I was “rude”, “anxious”, or “attention-seeking”, and though these didn’t really reflect how I actually felt, I didn’t have the facility to argue.

So for years I was basically “stuck” having a lot of communication problems that were directly related to speech difficulties I didn’t even realize I had, but that were being explained away constantly as personality flaws or emotional problems.

And when you try to treat a functional difference as if it’s a personality flaw or emotional problem, you’re likely to produce a whole lot of frustration and cognitive dissonance in the process. I had a pervasive sense of cognitive dissonance for years because of how I knew certain things about myself, but couldn’t readily express them, and got told things about me that weren’t true, but that I couldn’t verbally supplant with more accurate things.

It wasn’t until I started trying strategies that were totally different from most of the advice I’d received over the years that things actually started getting better for me.

Maybe for a lot of people, their understanding of a lot of things is inextricably bound up with language in such a way that the language “contains” their understanding (meaning that when they speak, they are really and truly communicating what they know), but for me, understanding is a totally separate thing.

For someone whose main trouble with speech is because it brings them outside of themselves, it might be hard to imagine the sort of receptive language problems I grew up with, and the way that I developed speech as a pattern before I understood a word of language, let alone its purpose. I would suggest reviewing the things that I and others (Anne C., possibly zilari) have written on this blog and some other ones about figuring out conversations as patterns only, and regarding those patterns as puzzles to be solved rather than intentional communication from within someone’s mind to someone else’s. Those of us who grew up that way have a very different experience of both language and communication than people who grew up, like you, having a somewhat more typical understanding of both but being either reluctant or unable to use them. Donna Williams talks about the difference between slow or reluctant but existent expressive and receptive speech, and people who had to “tame dysfunctional language,” and I’m definitely in the second category of people: My development of expressive and receptive spoken and written language takes a radically different trajectory than most people’s does, both in quantity and in quality.

Even at a time when I had a strong desire to communicate, I did not usually enact that desire by talking. I might do some combination of singing, music, body language (not recognizable to most people), and the placement of objects (whether books or other ones) around me, however. Only one person ever picked up on the meaning of all that, and she comments on this blog from time to time. She and I also used to have phone conversations where I did lose speech in the middle, but we would either just sit there quietly, or we would begin tapping out prime numbers to each other with our fingers, trying to see how high we could go.

For a long time, I did not regard myself in childhood as being all that quiet. Then I kept hearing people describing me in that manner. My mother describes me as not starting a lot of verbal conversations in childhood, and only talking once someone else talked to me. My neighbors across the street were talking to me (as an adult) about my lack of diagnosis as a child (they had a child who was diagnosed with something relatively early), and they told me “It was because you were so quiet all the time. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” While I know that I screamed and cried at times (which isn’t quiet), I think they meant that I didn’t talk to people very often. I also found a legal paper at one point (collected by a district attorney for an abuse case where charges were never pressed, years earlier) in which, at the time in my life when I was more talkative and social than any other, I was described as quiet and not very social, in fact so much so that they had trouble finding witnesses of the abuse. And my mother says that at a certain point in my life, I would call her up and then just sit there on the phone without talking, but not let her hang up.

Finding all those things out was one of the first ways I began to puzzle out the lines between what my experience of the world was, and what others saw of me. I experienced the world as loud, noisy, and overloading, so I had these time periods in my life classified as loud. Other people experienced me as quiet, and that was confusing to me.

I know that at times in my life I could talk for relatively long periods of time, but that was more a case of recitation and momentum than a case of having something in my mind that I wanted to communicate for others — just as I have trouble starting things, I also often have trouble stopping them.

I am told that I still use a lot of the same word-generation patterns that I did at that time, I just use them for what is inside my head, rather than as a complex puzzle I am attempting to solve. And just as speech happening was not happening because I wanted it to, my lack of speech (when it happened) was not happening because I just didn’t feel like talking. I couldn’t generally start conversations (still have lots of trouble doing that) whether I wanted to or not (although I did figure out a few ways a tiny bit of the time), and when I had periods of lacking speech, I could not speak, whether I wanted to or not.

I think that what you and I call argumentative are two different things. Here is what I was referring to:

There was a time period when I would argue with people, not because I thought they were wrong, but because it was part of a learned pattern of speech generation. I could come up with plausible-sounding reasons they were wrong, regardless of whether I thought they were wrong or not. Even if they changed in mid-conversation to agreement with me, I would simply switch sides and argue the other side. This was completely triggered, not a voluntary behavior, and I would watch it happening and be unable to stop it. I consider that an extremely argumentative communication style, despite the fact that it wasn’t all that voluntary.

On the other hand, at the moment there is something different that happens that could be considered argumentative, although I don’t really consider it to be so. It is easier for me to say something in correcting an inaccuracy in what someone else says, than it is for me to come up with the same thing to say out of the blue. This is an extension of my difficulty initiating just about everything: Thought, action, language, conversation, interaction, memory, etc. The same difficulties in initiating things that are why I was in fact pretty quiet as a child.

I have to have a trigger in order to set off a pattern of memory and translation of that memory into words, and one very good trigger is being told the opposite of something that is true. (Far better trigger than asking me a question, which just sends me spinning into frustration if I try to engage with it.) Because of this, it is far easier for me to say something in reaction to something I have read somewhere that disagrees wtih me, than to just come up with something to say on my own.

I realized somewhere along the line that this was why some people considered me argumentative (which seemed a strange, out of the blue accusation). But it is very different than arguing for its own sake whether I believe something or not. The things I say that are triggered by the false description are the more accurate description, as in they are things that exist inside my head, rather than things that I am just saying because it’s part of some programmed language routine in my brain somewhere. I do not consider myself currently to be all that argumentative, because I no longer argue points just to argue points regardless of whether I believe them. I just use inaccurate statements (such as many in your comment that I am using for this purpose right now) to jumpstart language into describing the more accurate ones.

As to the other personality traits, they did indeed decrease. I do have a particular personality, and always have had that particular personality. Language makes it difficult for me to show that personality at its fullest, and speech makes it impossible. The difficulties of language and (even more so) speech, and the force required to produce them, can masquerade as all the traits that would seem to suddenly disappear at times when I was not using speech. Although any sort of language (including comprehending language) is going to induce some false appearance of those traits in me, the leap from speech to typing was a great enough one for those traits to appear suddenly and abruptly reduced.

Keep in mind, also, that I am talking about offline everyday-conversational communication here. Martha Leary commented when I met her, that what she sees is that when I type to produce language, I am focused and not necessarily very expressive, and then the moment I stop typing and the words are being spoken by my communication device, my body suddenly lights up with a lot more physical expressiveness (although still not standard degrees or kinds of it, from what I’ve been told). The act of producing and understanding language at all hinders the expression of my natural personality traits, which is why I so value the friendships I have that do not require much conversation. But the act of producing speech, which is even harder than just ordinary language, doesn’t just hinder them, it erases all sign of them.

So the underlying personality I showed was not a sign of maturation, it was a sign of that personality being less hindered by the least effective mode of communication possible. I had always had that personality when alone, or when not hindered (or less hindered) by speech and/or language. It was just a matter of the difficulty of doing other things, distorting or erasing all impression of what I was actually like.

Very few people up to that point (I can count two or three humans and several cats) knew me very well at all, because their impression of who I was, was not just the suppression of my natural personality traits, but also the addition of the techniques I had learned in the land of speech-as-puzzle-to-solve. Imagine if instead of using speech to say something that was in your head, you primarily used it because it was part of a learned pattern of something you were required to do, something like schoolwork where you don’t perceive any choice involved or any other possible way things could be. There seem to be some things required of you, as in schoolwork, that don’t take who you are into account. And you do it the same way most people (especially people who had difficulty with schoolwork) would do schoolwork, as a difficult and exhausting but mandatory process that doesn’t reflect who you are at all, but rather what work the teachers seem to want to see filled in on their worksheets. That’s how I handled most speech, so it not only obscured my personality, but gave the impression of a different sort of personality than the one I had, just as would happen if most people took schoolwork as the primary indication of any given child’s personality, particularly a child who finds schoolwork difficult but plugs away at it anyway.

So when I began typing, what happened was that my natural personality was less suppressed, and the overlays of false assumptions of my personality based on how I handled speech, fell away. So it looked like a pretty drastic and immediate change. Since I could speak some of the day and not the rest of the day, this change happened back and forth several times a day and was extremely obvious when it occurred. I suspect if people had not known me as well as some of them did know me, they’d have thought I was two entirely different people. So for me, speech, even at its absolute best (I think the peak of my superficial speech was in my early teens or just before, and the peak of my actual expressiveness of thought in speech occurred towards the end of my ability to use it), was a barrier to communication, not a means of communication.

I hope that makes things clearer. I don’t normally know you as someone who assumes this much about a person, so I’m guessing the assumptions are rooted in your own experiences of speech, language, and communication, which differ greatly from mine.

I can understand how your using speech to communicate made you really stressed out and that staring to use a keyboard was liberating and relaxing; but I’m surprised that it changed your perceivable personality so much. I think you are argumentative at times, and you know the extent to which you are still (if at all) “stressy, anxious, scattered, over-intense, rude, inconsiderate, unemotional, overemotional, boring, crazy, argumentative, black-and-white”. And wasn’t your turning “more flexible, sensitive, perceptive, empathetic” also part of your becoming a more mature person?

When you used speech you wanted to communicate, even though it was really stressful to speak. When I was a child I spoke little – my mother said that she couldn’t get a word out of me, and teachers remarked how quiet I was in class – but that was because I didn’t want to communicate. Though to a small extent that was because I stammered and/or stuttered, that wasn’t the fundamental reason. Though I much prefer typing to speaking, to me communication, in whatever medium, is not easy and natural because it means going out of myself, and I am most truly myself when I live within myself.

I was like that with sexual attraction. At grade 5, I was told (along with everyone else) about puberty and the changes it would bring, and they said something like ‘you will start having crushes on the opposite gender’ (they didn’t even recognize gay people, and this was around 1999). It didn’t occur to me that it could be any different than that – though I knew about gay people at least, I didn’t even think of the possibility that I might be gay. I just thought ‘I will have crushes now that I’m entering puberty’. And with some boys (and even more girls, but I ignored that) I asthetically liked their appearance, or thought they were interesting, or liked them as people, and I assumed that must be a crush, and acted the way I’d read about people acting in books when they had crushes. It probably creeped the boys out.