To the Creative Writing Students at Pershing Middle School in Houston:

Thank you for reading my poem.  I am honored that you read it as part of your school day.  School was a difficult place for me for many reasons, so it gives me a great deal of happiness to know my words are being read by students.

To tell you a little about myself, I am fifteen years old.  My favorite things to do are biking, swimming and reading. I live with my 13-year-old sister, my parents, one dog, one cat and one fish. I love ice cream, pizza and I-HOP.  And I never had a way to tell people much of anything until I started typing.  I can make sounds, but when I try to say words the sounds do not come out like I want.  That is because I have apraxia.  Many people on the autism spectrum have apraxia.  Apraxia is the fancy way of saying that I can’t get my lips, tongue and jaw to do the things they need to do in order to make sounds into words. 

When I was in elementary school, my mom would sometimes come talk to the other students about autism and apraxia.  She would have them make certain sounds and think about what the different parts of their mouths were doing. For example, she would tell them to try making the long “E” sound and hold it out. You will notice that your face is like a tight smile. Your jaw and your chin go forward.  Try making the “D” sound (like the letter D).  You will notice that you have to put the tip of your tongue up hard against the roof of your mouth before making the E-smile.  Try making the “oo” sound (like in goose and moose), and you will see that your lips have to pucker like a fish.  To make a long “I” sound (like in “ice”), you have to open you jaw really wide.  To make the sound a “c” makes in words like “cup” or “cake”, you have to very gently touch the middle and back of your tongue to a certain place at the roof of your mouth and let just a tiny bit of air out.  You can do this with all the sounds and see that it actually takes a lot of different movements to make words.  You guys can do them all without even thinking about it.  People with apraxia, however, cannot.  I think of it like a road in my brain being obstructed.  Words in my head are like cars on a road to nowhere.  It is like the mother of all traffic jams.  I know what I want to say, but just can’t get the words out of my mouth. 

People with apraxia sometimes have difficulty programming their fingers, too.  Doctors would say people with apraxia have difficulty with motor control.  In my case, it means I cannot write with a pen or pencil, even though I have tried.  My fingers have great difficulty doing things that require tiny movements, like tying shoelaces, squeezing toothpaste onto a toothbrush, and opening things like candy wrappers and yogurt cartons.  

Learning to type was very challenging because of my apraxia.  It took a lot of practice.  I had trouble putting my finger on the correct button. It was incredibly frustrating. Have you ever felt so frustrated that you wanted to just hit something? That is how I felt early in learning to type.  I still feel like I want to hit something sometimes.  For now, I can only type with one finger.  I have to focus so intensely.  I hit keys next to the one I actually want a lot of the time, and so typing takes me a long time. I do all of my typing on an Ipad because the keyboard on my Ipad has larger buttons than what you would find on a typical computer keyboard.  

When you cannot speak and you cannot write, life can be torturous. People really do not know how to interact with someone like me, so often I have been ignored.  For a long time, going to school was completely awful because kids did not speak to me, and teachers spoke to me like I was in kindergarten.  They made assumptions because of my disability. 

If having you read my blog means that one less kid with autism is feeling lonely and miserable at school, then I will feel like I accomplished something – with your help. Talk to the kids with autism the same way you talk to your friends. Don’t ever stop talking to them, even if you don’t get much of a response.  We especially want to feel included.  Don’t assume that not speaking is the same as not understanding.  Don’t assume that someone isn’t listening just because they can’t show it.  Don’t assume that someone isn’t grateful for your friendship just because they don’t respond the way most people do. Thank you.

I love hearing from you.  Please keep reading.