I am echolalic. I am not a gestalt language processor.
The ways I communicate, are, not tied to the descriptions of professionals. They're too wobbly. They move. They aren't stages where I move from one to another. If I'm scripting more today than yesterday that's not better or worse. If I don't have words at all that's not failure.
I'm echolalic and the way I commnicate is so specifically necessarily echolalia and not any other word. As I once again echo the the words of autistic advocates who came before me. The echolalia of describing my echolalia with the words echolalia used by others because this is ours and that matters.
It matters that I am able to say things the way I do. Because the way I built communication out of mixing sentence structure from here and phrases from there and smoosh my words in there and out come a thing. The way I did this online away from the professionals and with others like me.
I am that echolalic person who was thought when I was a teenager, that I came from England, becase the places I learned language from were British Fantasy books.
And I'm that echolalic person who still will squish a word from here and a sentence structure from there, to the point where people won't even notice.
If you don't understand the meaning that does not mean it is not there. If you misundestand me that does not mean I am not saying the things I am saying. My communication is not about needing to learn to "break down" things even as I have smooshed things together.
Even as I did that I'll echo entire phrases as I choose. It's my choice. I just find this the current least energy cost manner to get across the ideas I want. (Or truthfully, repeating my own from a decade or two ago, when they first were formed in this manner and have been used since.)
Tunes and songs don't talk about me. I wasn't a kid who was all about learning things by intonation. But give me a book and I would learn the phrases from those characters more than the people around me.
I'm echolalic. I'm echolalic because I do this echoing. I'm echolalic because it makes communication so much more efficient. I'm echolalic becase when I'm out of energy I can get things across. I'm echolalic because when I know what I want to say and not how to say it I can probably get something close enough you can follow.
Collecting up scripts and scripts and scripts to the point of not even remembering them until they come out is effective for being able to grab something at a moment's notice.
But I'm not a gestalt language processor. I'm not one because you always leave out people like me. You forget we can exist. I'm not one because I don't want you to claim me when my commnication is not defined by somoene like you. I'm not one because my communication is so far more powerful than a definition.
