The Artfulness of Autistic Communication

About the Author

Kai Pretto /kaɪ ˈpɹɛtoʊ/, M.A., CCC-SLP, is a nonbinary, Autistic/ADHD speech-language pathologist, researcher, and poet. Their greatest passion as a speech-language pathologist is in supporting Neurodivergent individuals who use complex, multimodal communication, including augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) and echolalic gestalts. Kai’s poetry focuses on identity, childhood, and experiences of Otherness and their writing can be found in multiple independent literary publications, including Stirring and The Shore.

What Does “Professional” Communication Mean?

I started out writing a very different article. In fact, with the deadline looming, I began to say to myself: Is this really my voice or what I think it’s supposed to sound like to be both Autistic and “professional?” So, in very AuDHD fashion, I rewrote the entire piece. But, I think, I landed a little closer to where I originally intended.

If you’d like to hear me talk about the intersections of my work as a speech-language pathologist who works with Autistic individuals AND of my lived experience as a late-diagnosed Autistic adult, please come to my presentation on echolalia on May 14th and ask all the questions. I will do my best to answer them. 

But I’m going to go a different route here.

I have scavenged the bones of the previous article to pull out a few pieces. After a great deal of reflection, I made the decision to go back to my first draft and include them as vignettes. This is how my brain makes the best sense of things—a puzzle, maybe, or a scattering of leaves. This is, unintentionally, also a dedication to the love I have for my partner and the cherished, low-spoon¹ space that is our home. And this is me in the raw, before I take all the pieces and package them so they make sense for someone else:

“Autistic communication is not a fault, not something broken that needs to be fixed. It is its own vibrant microcosm of sense-making, dimensions of time and space mollusc-curled around each other. It is a cacophony of knowing and not-knowing, of seeking and gathering.”

“The mouth sounds that we make in our moments of purest joy, the echo of you to me and back to you—the refraction and reflection of us—are the times I feel most wholly connected to the earth.”

“At home, we stim: with our hands, our mouths, our feet. We have a coming home song (‘Cat in the Window,’ sung to the tune of ‘Come to My Window’ by Melissa Etheridge). We begin singing ‘Mad World’ by Michael Andrews over silly things, like dropping a pencil on the floor or when our cat is pouting about a rainy day. We have little ditties we make up about how much we love each other or all the ways we are sorry to the chair we knocked over by accident. We meow and bellow and make our voices into mirror image music boxes of each other.”

“I have learned the small talk script that is for the teacher’s lounge (although I generally eat lunch in my office) and the small talk script for my students’ parents and the small talk script for the cashier at the grocery store.”

“Where does it feel comfortable to visibly stim? What cadence of voice do I use at the gas station compared to talking on the phone to my mother? Do I use the gas station resonance and pitch with the insurance analyst or do I need to alter that, too?”

“What happens when my safe people are no longer safe? Why do I have to make myself small to stim, why do my words have to march in steady lines instead of dance?”

Echolalia: Love Language & Poetry

And, naturally, flowing from these vignettes, I have turned back to poetry, my first and truest love. 

I remember the first time I found poetry: I was sitting in the back of my father’s mail truck, collecting all the rubberbands, when his friend, without any explanation, walked up and handed me a copy of Shel Silverstein’s “A Light in the Attic.” I cracked open the brand-new binding, smelled the pages, and suddenly in front of me was everything I had ever wanted to do with my mouth. For me, it was the start of sense-making, self-making. 

Poetry, at its very best, bends and breaks the rules of language in ways that prose never can. It dances in sound. It repeats and doubles back. It runs in circles. It treats language as the magical thing it is, as the wholly human but also primal thing it is, and doesn’t pretend that it must always be just one way. 

Below is a previously unpublished poem that I wrote specifically for this article, which better captures so many of my feelings about communication more than any stand-alone article could—not as a professional, but as something viscerally experienced. I hope for my fellow Autists there is something familiar here. And I hope, for those allistic (i.e., “non-Autistic”)² folks reading this, there might also be some insight:

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MOUTH

My tongue is glob & globe: So often 
it sits heavy in my mouth, chewed gum pulled 
from under desk & regretted 
a moment too late. And so often it is, too, 
map of the continents of self: 
              Rapid fire
              around-the-world tour
              for a crowd of one.

It has been too fast, too slow. 
Too intense, too wet, too dry. 
Too soft, too loud, 
              too 
                            too 
                                          too. It has been 
too many things 
              and often, also, 
              not enough. 

              It has been exploding diamonds—cavernous, 
                            immaculate; empty oh, white sheet in 
              a windstorm; 
                            watchtower, vigilant in the darkest 
                            dark.

Sometimes words are tar 
in the back of my throat. A sticky dungeon 
of lost things. Language running

              involuntarily 
              from my mouth.

But other times, non-words are sanctuary: 
                            Sound of my own ocean-blood, 
              pounding; pitter patter 
              of heartbeat, thrumming; toewalk across 
              blank brain screen;

              conch shell eardrum hush.

Before I could speak,
each bird call & raindrop on roof—marbles of 
sounds
ricocheting through the cavern of my mouth—joy in
the act 
              of becoming both
              known & unknowable. 

And, then, sanctuary 
of the familiar: 
                                          Tiptap ratatat, wish gulp 
whoa
                                          Tree frog caterpillar 
a-r-i-t-h-m-e-t-i-c
                                         “A Rat In The House Might 
Eat Tasty Ice Cream”³
                                          Itsy bitsy she’ll be comin’ 
round 
                                           the mountain she’ll be 

                                          My mother’s hands. Inverted 
                            planes of reality 
                            from the upside down. Squish me 
                            back into
              body, back 

into the earth again. 
Today 

birdsong, sweetest alarm clock. I put 
on my shoes and step out 
into the dew-ripe dawn. I have many jobs to do, 
many places to go. I meow good morning 
to my cat, check my to-do list, and prepare 
to crack open

familiar catalogues of scripts 
so complex

they look like conversation.

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Double Empathy Communication

I invite anyone reading this to take a moment and reflect on what, if anything, came up for you as you read the above poem. (Three times through is generally the sweet spot for comprehension). Close your eyes and feel it, the best you can:

• Where does my sense of communication intersect with your own? 
• Where does it differ? 
• What feels familiar or comfortable?
• Where is it so wildly outside of your understanding that you felt lost? 

I hope, gently, that for allistic folks reading this there is at least a moment of confusion or discomfort. 

When we talk about Autistic communication, we must consider the double empathy problem⁴: while communication can be challenging between Autistic and allistic individuals, the challenge in this communication does not rest solely in the hands of the Autistic person who must be fixed. Rather, to be able to better understand each other we must come together from a place of mutual compassion, where neither form of communication is viewed as inferior or superior, but just is. 

So often in my life I have felt I had to move through the world in ways that were unnatural to me. I have learned how to do this over time, voluntarily and context-specifically, but spent much of my early life doing it from a place of shame. My most authentic communication probably wouldn’t make a great deal of sense to my neurotypical peers and might even make them uncomfortable. Yet I have spent my whole life having to learn how to communicate while moving through a world that was shaped for them.

So, then, what would it look like for them to explore—earnestly explore—what an autism-shaped world might look like? What could they appreciate that they currently miss? And, most importantly, what is there to learn from each other when we all try to really, truly listen?

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References

¹ “Low-spoon” refers to spoon theory, a disability metaphor first proposed by Christine Miserandino, an individual with Lupus, to explain the limitation of mental and physical energy available for daily tasks. Spoons represent finite units of energy, where an individual may have more or less spoons available based on multiple factors. Here, a “low-spoon space” refers to a space where I do not need to mask (i.e., suppress natural Autistic traits to blend in, avoid stigma, or feel safe), a behavior that often leaves me exhausted.

² Allistic:  https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/allistic

³  Adventures in Wonderland, season 1, episode 10, “Forget Me Not,” directed by Gary Halvorson, aired April 1992, on Disney Channel.

⁴ The double empathy problem, proposed by Autistic researcher Damian Milton in 2012, is the theory that mutual misunderstanding between autistic and non-Autistic (allistic) people arises from differing experiences and communication styles, not solely from autistic “deficits”. (https://reframingautism.org.au/miltons-double-empathy-problem-a-summary-for-non-academics/)