Forced to speak: What I lost when I learned to talk
I came into this world 16 weeks early, in a year that wasn’t ready for me — 1996. I wasn’t ready for it either. Born at 24 weeks, I was shoved into a warzone of wires and machines — six months in the NICU, barely clinging to something people call “life.”
They called it saving me. I call it something else.
One of the many casualties of my early birth was my sight. My retinas didn’t just detach — they were obliterated. Hyperoxia destroyed them beyond recognition. By the time the bleeding in my brain was noticed, damage had already been done: massive hemorrhaging, a rewired brain full of fluid pockets, and shrunken lobes struggling to function in a world that demanded performance, not survival.
I was supposed to come out of that as just a blind kid. That’s what they told my parents. That all the strange ways I moved, stayed silent, and failed to meet milestones — that was “just blindness.”
But it wasn’t.
I didn’t walk until I was nearly three. I couldn’t babble. I didn’t even understand what speech was. My parents had to teach me the mechanics of vocalization by putting my hand on their throats, like decoding a foreign transmission with no context. I repeated meaningless syllables in my bed at night, not because I was forming language, but because I had discovered a strange noise I could make — and nothing more.
Proprioception? Missing. I didn’t know I had joints that bent. I didn’t know how many fingers I had. I didn’t know how to climb onto a bed without throwing myself onto it like a ragdoll. It took years of therapy to teach me how to be in a body, and even longer to understand how to “perform” human communication.
And still — no one said “autism.” Not once.
They blamed it all on blindness. But here’s the thing: every blind person I’ve asked about this said the same thing — “That’s not how it went for me.” Their development may have been delayed, but not dismantled. Not gutted. Not rewritten from zero like mine was.
So now, nearly 30 years later, I’m calling it what it was: erasure.
I look back on those early, non-verbal years — the silence, the internal world I lived in — and I wish I’d never been dragged out of it.
I didn’t learn to speak because I wanted to. I learned to survive. To be acceptable. To not be abandoned. My silence was seen as a problem to fix, not a language of its own.
And I miss it.
I miss the quiet. The clarity. The way nothing needed to be explained. I didn’t have to dig through my mind for words that don’t come easy. I didn’t have to fight to make a sentence, to sound “normal,” to pass.
Talking is a kind of violence against myself. Every time I open my mouth, I lose a piece of me. It’s effort. It’s labor. It’s ripping meaning out of a place that never asked to be mined.
I didn’t ask to speak. I was forced.
And if I could undo it? I would. I’d put on my noise-canceling headphones, shut the world out, and go back to the wordless space where I didn’t need to explain who I am. Where being was enough.
But I can’t go back. I’m stuck in a world that only listens to people who make sound. That sees silence as failure. That punishes difference until it conforms or collapses.
So I speak. Not because I want to — but because they made me.
And every word costs more than anyone knows.
Some days, the words won’t come at all. They get stuck halfway up my throat, like I swallowed something jagged and it never quite went down. I know what I want to say, but it won’t move. It just sits there, pressing and choking, like my body’s rejecting the act of speaking.
Other times, the words escape too early — wrong words, misplaced ones, things I didn’t mean but couldn’t stop. It’s like trying to carve meaning out of sand. No matter how careful I am, it slips through.
This isn’t just about talking. Writing hurts too. Sometimes I sit for hours with a sentence trapped in my head, trying to coax it out like it’s some scared animal in the corner of a dark room. I type. I delete. I type again. Even when I find the words, they feel slightly wrong — like they’re wearing someone else’s clothes.
It’s exhausting, living in a world where communication is currency, and my wallet’s always half-empty.
People think because I can talk — or write — that it must be easy now. That I’m “high functioning,” whatever that means. But they don’t see the pauses. The rewrites. The silent screaming. The days when I choose silence not because I have nothing to say, but because saying it would wreck me.
Sometimes, all I want is to go quiet again — not out of defeat, but out of self-respect. Because silence, to me, was never the absence of language. It was the only place I ever felt whole.
And maybe if anyone had looked past the blindness — really looked — they would’ve seen that. Maybe they would’ve noticed I was speaking all along, just not in the language they expected. In the rocking, the stillness, the rhythms only I knew how to hear.
But they didn’t.
So I learned their language. I made my mouth move. I paid the toll.
And still, they don’t hear me.
So here I am — nearly thirty years later, still translating myself into something palatable. Still molding my thoughts into words that never quite fit. Still grieving the part of me that spoke in silence.
I don’t want pity. I don’t need applause for surviving something I never had a choice in. But I do want the truth known. That there are people like me — born too soon, rewired by trauma, misread by a world that only sees what it expects to see.
We exist.
We’re here, speaking — even when it hurts, even when it costs. But don’t mistake our words for ease, or our silence for absence. We’re not broken. We were just forced to translate a language we were never meant to abandon.
If you listen closely, you might still hear it — the echoes of what was taken, and the strength it takes to keep speaking anyway.