 The Thoughty Autie podcast. The other aspect is language. So I was about 80% meaning death when I was young. So when I was in preschool, all I saw was fragmented pieces of information. All I heard was phonics. So these fragmented things, I'm trying to give you an idea of how it felt. So these fragmented things were making sound phonics to one another. So I didn't create the association with the image and the sound to create word. What I was hearing was just pattern speak. What I was seeing was visual patterns. I was very hyperactive. And I was like, I don't know what I was saying about this. I was like, there that. Like animal crossing. Yes, absolutely. You know, little animalese speak, but they don't think, I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, or like for older viewers, and I used to watch reruns of these peanuts, Charlie Brown, when they used to be in the school, we would do this trumpet sound. It would be the adult speaking. And yeah, yeah, the sort of, you've never heard the adult, which is, I always liked that they'd done that because it was purely about the kids and all their, their, Charlie Brown was quite an endearing character. He's a bit of a solker, a bit of a, but he would always get there in the end. He would, he would always have his friends to back him up. I like the kind of sounds like me as a kid. Well, yeah, I think it kind of sounds like me too. Maybe that's why we relate to it. But nevertheless, that is how I heard and saw this garnered quite serious attention from the head mistress who was at the preschool, quite worrying attention. She thought the reason why I was acting and behaving the way I was was some sort of abuse. It was sort of subjectively kind of hinted up because she wanted an appointment with my mum outside of the preschool and my mum let her in. And she, the first thing she said was, Oh, you've got a nice sitting room. And I said, what, what, what do you think was meant by that? You know, what, what, and my mum's observation of that comment was, it was a judgment and expect, expect it to be. Yeah. She was building up a framework of what this house would look like in connection with how I was behaving or she thought I was behaving at preschool. But going back to the language thing, it kind of makes sense. You know, the, the condition you would call it is you hear it a lot in brain injury. Again, you hear a lot of these words in brain injury. Aphasia and all aphasia is it affects the left hemisphere and you've got different types. So I don't have a receptive and expressive one. And probably the one that was most prominent was a nomia, a nomia or a nomia dependent, a nomic aphasia is word finding. So as I got older and by speech progressed, a lot of it was dysfunctional in the sense that if I couldn't hear the frequencies and sound patterns of what others were doing, that would actually echo back and actually have an impact on how I spoke. So it's a feedback loop, isn't it? What I'm hearing is going to represent to what I'm saying. I was a Zecalelic for a longer period of time. So my language was more pattern theme and feel rather than interpretive. The perfect example you gave was of the rattle. And also that's associative. So the rattle is a baby's rattle. You're making a visual association that it's rattle and then you get its function, its interpretive function. We see things via function functionality. That's how our brain interprets things as objects, isn't it? Why do we see a chair as a chair and not wheels with plastic coming off and a cushion and stuff like that? It's because of its function. We sit on a chair. So it's a chair. That is just a whole thing. So now you can understand why I was context blind and meaning blind because all I saw, I would either see a wheel or a cushion or a bit of wood that wouldn't be able to bring the gestalt together to make chair. And that was the same with people. So the language thing meant that I didn't get the feedback receptively or expressively. So the pattern theme and feel language was language that was a motive base, but it was to do with my reality of the world. So it was perceived as nonsense speak by others, word salad, but it wasn't. It had a function. It had an internal function for me. Lots of squealing. The squealing, the high pitched squealing would be happiness and the sort of downturned, monotone grunts would be unhappiness. Lots of clicking for anxiety. So I would click, you know, like that. Test fumping would be about dissociation and body disconnection. So fumping my chest and trying to, trying to get back in you, getting the feedback, the, the somatosensory feedback in order to feel kind of a bit more use. Yeah, you've got it. And sculpting things would be a partly a communicatory thing as well. Until in my head, I used to do that. If I like people, if I sense their energy and I like them and I wanted to be around them, I may not have appeared like I wanted to be around them. I may have appeared quite aloof at times. I did want to connect, but I didn't have the facial expressions or the clarity, the visual clarity to connect in a way that which maybe they expected. Now, my parents were very good with this because how I recognise them was, was one piece of information. So my father, I used to sculpt his face. So I knew that face was father. And with my mother, who I've adopted a curly hair, I would, I would feel a hair and I would know that was mother. So by extension, I was face blind as well. So I wasn't just object blind or meaning blind, I was face blind. So you can kind of see how these things interplayed with one another, the visual perception not only affected my learning, my social perception, but context and association and language, because I didn't have that bridge with pictures meant that my language, it kind of makes sense because that filter was a little bit like, like a bottleneck. There's a sort of bottleneck there. It made sense why my language was my own. It was very egocentric, I suppose language. And even typically developing children will have egocentric language for a very long time. I'm quite surprised. I teach kids to like share toys and yes. Yeah, you do. I remember going around a friend's house who had a little boy that still have it. It's not past tense. He's still with us. He's about seven now. And he was free. And this is egocentric development fascinates me, particularly toddlers because I like the way they think probably because I sometimes think similarly. Yes. And he's a love and it was really interesting why he got upset. I could oddly relate to it. Sam, the father said to Jasper to be a good boy, to be a good boy. Can you move those balloons? Now his reaction was actually really interesting. So he started to well up and cry, which I really felt for him is his lip was quivering. And he said he pointed at himself. And he said in earnest, but I am a good boy. And Sam didn't get it. So Sam said again, but to be a good boy. Can you can you move? Can you move those balloons? And he went again, he said, but I am a good boy. And I sort of thought, yeah, he, he's not making the link with the balloons. And how that will somehow magically make him a good boy? Because actually, he's oddly right. I am a good boy. How do you become a good boy if you're not already a good boy? Exactly. And why would the balloons have any impact on me being a good boy? So actually, in an odd way, semantically, I thought, hmm, this is actually quite an interesting discourse. The adults trying to say, do this, and Jasper's reality is, but why? Because I'm already that. And I found that really just from a psychological and social point of view, quite interesting. That, that would be quite, quite an interesting kind of point to just like, linking with like, PDA, like the pathological demand avoidance. It's like, the expectations is what causes the, the difficulty with demands on, on you. Like, if you don't do the demand, then you're, you're not good. I mean, you get a punishment or like, you know, there's those kind of associations that you get when people tell you to do things. It's, I find it really interesting, because I know that there's, you know, the majority of people who listen to this podcast, they tend to be autistic, I think. Oh, I'm sure. I think looking at your Instagram, I think you're pretty much on the money with that. Yes. Yeah. I'm sure that there's going to be like a lot of people who aren't like parents, kind of wanting to see what autism is kind of like an adulthood. And, you know, from, from talking to you and hearing about your experiences with difficulties with visual things and being nonverbal, like your ability to describe and kind of, I guess, give, give a picture of what your world is like is, is very, very detailed and very, very well kind of constructed, which I suppose it kind of goes in, in some people's minds, like against, you know, your early kind of childhood experiences in a way in, in terms of like how well you, you speak. It's something that I experience a lot as well. Like, you know, how do you do these things? How do you like socialize? How do you like, empathize with people when, you know, you struggle with cognitive empathy, you struggle with lexifimia, you have communication difficulties, social difficulties, like, why has this become something that you excel in? Like, is, is, was there any, like, drive for you to what to want to do that? Was it kind of an emptiness? Because for me, it was an emptiness of connection that kind of drew me to doing these kind of things. Yeah, that's very interesting. I think the first person I made friends with was myself. I think that was it. So when I was good, and I said this on the previous podcast, didn't I about my when I was functionally nonverbal, my speech was more dysfunctional, I was going out into the community. And I would attempt to connect. I would attempt with what language I had to try and connect with the older children. They were somewhat older than me. And their gaps in knowledge meant that they would be withdrawal, or they would be ignored, or I would be in it doesn't take a lot. No, it doesn't. It just takes just takes like a slight delay in like the flow of conversation for people to kind of get awkward, look around, get distracted, like, yeah, you're absolutely right. And then it got quite viscous, you know, it wasn't just ignoring it was actually trying to wind me up or pushing me kicking me hitting me, etc. But as I said in the previous podcast, I'm I've laid bare all that and I'm actually I've internalised it to the point where I can talk about it, don't get affected by it, don't get triggered by it. Humanised them because they may have had developmental challenges they could well have. They may have had kids. Yes. Yeah, they have children. So a lot of them are married, you know, and do have children. So I had to kind of, you know, internalise that in a more structured and more balanced way. I think the void is an isn't very powerful description, the void of connection. I suppose I started realising I was different around 16, which I've been told is late. Maybe that's thankfully so, because obviously I'd gone through a large chunk of puberty by that point. Still had a long way to go. But a large chunk of it had been passed me by. So I think from that point of view, things didn't always hurt me as much because I didn't always understand the significance of what they were saying. I was so I was still meaning death. So in some ways, the meaning deafness protected me from the complications of interpretation.