Once upon a time, there was a thin little blonde girl who could talk for hours about any subject imaginable, from cars to horses to the sky. She was a curious little thing, who was almost obsessed with asking her mother why things were. This girl was smart, though it took her several years to learn to read. It was said that she had a speech impediment, but this was not true - only a stutter when she was nervous. It was fact that she spoke too fast; it was fact that she occasionally stammered, but as an excitable child, this was all natural. When the lady teaching her to speak stuck a thing into her ear to look at her eardrums, quite without her parent's knowledge, the little girl just thought it was a game. She did not know that perhaps the woman thought she was stupid.
The little girl was not stupid; she was smart and in her school, she learned to read before all the other kids who had problems in the group that she was part of. When this girl learned to read, when she suddenly comprehended what it was that she was looking at on the paper before her, an entire world opened up to her. When the little girl went to Kelowna with her family, she saw road signs and for the first time, she knew what they said. No longer were the markings on the signs meaningless blobs; they meant things and the little girl eagerly went to her elementary school library, taking out Henry and Mudge.
From there on, the little girl read every day to the point of obsession, for hours and hours because it was wonderful. She learned to write and with this new found ability, she wrote down her day dreams and created a world of fantasy full of creatures of canid design. Through elementary and high school she followed this dream and she follows in now, but somewhere along the line, she lost her ability to vocally communicate.
The young woman speaks intelligently no longer. Her brain only knows the way of the pen and the pencil and the keyboard for communication now. It gives her pause to wonder - was the little girl smarter? What happened?
There's no way to know.
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I empathise with you there. Once you dive into the written world, the spoken one seems so superfluous, it fades until fluency with it is forgotten. I too communicate best through a keyboard or a letter and it saddens me somewhat that I can be among family or friends and find myself unable to share my precious artistic thoughts. I gave up a while ago, because very few people share the breadth of knowledge and passion for the kind of things that interest folks like us, and I can't really make the kind of connection I seek. They cannot understand it. It leaves one feeling like the stranger in the crowd.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I have often felt like there is a wall of glass between me and other people - I can try to speak, but nobody seems to hear me and they only really notice me when I walk up to me. We exchange pleasantries, then they return to talking about whatever they were talking about and I am forgotten, because I have no idea how to follow their conversation. I try, but after a while I just fall back into the abyss of my daydreaming again. It's sad.
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