Retrospective on Not Speaking for 2 Months
I spent 2 months not being able to speak
This happened to coincide with Inkhaven, where I spent every day writing 2x 500 word posts per day, truly a perfect for one who cannot speak.
I answered some frequently asked questions before. But I didn’t give a full description of all the various experiences.
TLDR: one-on-one is good, cuddling is great, speech accommodations are mid, random people are very accommodating, group conversations can be torturous.
When on your own, there is little difference
When you’re on your own, you basically don’t notice that you can’t speak.
There are some subtle things, such as needing to not make any noise (not coughing or not making utterances under your breath) which are in general actually surprisingly easy to stop doing pretty quickly. The occasional thing very rarely does still happen sometimes, which was occasionally slightly stressful, but OK.
I am the kind of person that does not mind just staying at home and doing things on my own for a reasonably long period of time. I spent my time playing my favorite game at the moment, Clade Code. But I did other things like play Slay the Spire 2.
I was living with my girlfriend. She would come home and say hi, and never quite gotten in the habit of remembering that I can’t speak. She would have some slight annoyance when I don’t reply to her, or not fully remember every single time that she needs to look my direction in order to see my response, as I could not say it but I could sign some response.
Having some vague self-made sign language signs was quite useful, Maybe learning a real sign language would have been good, but it is good to have some proxies for being able to quickly respond to things.
People in everyday life / airports are very accommodating
One thing I was slightly surprised by is the degree to which basically everyone who I interacted with was extra accommodating to the fact that I can’t speak. Most people just found it interesting and thought I was probably deaf, and then some assumed, “Oh, you can lip read,” and I’d be like, “Yeah, sure.”
I don’t know, some people would be like, “Oh, you’re deaf, I will also respond to you in text.” And if you’re ordering a coffee, I guess it doesn’t really matter. It’s probably easier to let them also write in text than explain all the context. But yeah, people were nice, even if sometimes they probably thought I was “dumb” by multiple meanings of the word.
Even at border control, the guy was very accommodating. Like, “Oh, you can’t speak.” So I took out the pile of documents I’d printed out, and I when I couldn’t find one to answer his question, and he was patient with me rummaging through papers and finding things on my phone and then writing things on sheets of paper.
The vibe from most people is “Wow, that sounds like it would suck,” and I’m glad that people are pretty understanding.
Being on a call is workable if you are prepared
If you’re in a Zoom call or similar, then there are two main options. One is that you use text-to-speech, which is fine. You just say things word by word and they hear things word by word. The other option is you type things to them by text.
Interestingly, I think people end up wanting to mirror the method of communication that you are doing. I had some interesting experiences where the other person would be using text-to-speech as well.
But yeah, generally you probably wouldn’t want to do your first call with someone this way, but it is also manageable, I guess.
If, however, you instead get a phone call out of the blue from someone, then it can be more annoying to try to respond quickly. I did not manage to get this to work, but I don’t really get many phone calls, so it’s not been a huge issue.
Talking to one friend is good but slightly harder
If you’re in a situation where you’re talking to one person, not being able to speak is mostly fine.
One person describe spending time with me as “it felt like I was just spending time on my own.” Other people also found it less socially draining. Perhaps not needing to be ready to respond to someone at any time? It’s interesting.
It also influences you to prefer having the interaction be physical contact / head-scratches / cuddling, which is perfect if you are a catgirl !
The conversational pace is mostly between you and the other person, and the other person has your full attention. So taking the extra time you need to type something out or write on a whiteboard is mostly fine. You might feel guilty for a while but you get used to it.
You do learn somewhat that you need to be quite efficient with your typing or writing. Sometimes you might even be slower just choosing the three-word way to say something instead of the ten-word way, and that word order matters. Having shorthands for most commonly said things is very helpful too... if someone asks perhaps I can make a guide for my tips and tricks…
I did generally tend to being more of a listener role than a speaking role. But this is already somewhat my natural inclination, and generally it’s interesting to hear what people are saying. Also, people like talking about themselves, and if they have a reason not to feel guilty about this then they may even like talking to you more.
Talking to multiple people is terrible terrible terrible
Trying to have any sort of conversation in a group setting with multiple people generally sucks a lot. I already mentioned in other posts, but when people are in a group conversation, basically all of their effort is trained on intervening at the right times, listening to other people, looking at other people, hearing people speak as they speak, and filtering out noise from the background that’s not part of the group conversation, speed speed speed.
Your TTS is also filtered out as noise from background conversation. If you can’t speak, you just cannot keep up with the pace. You can try using text-to-speech on the laptop, which is the fastest way you can speak if you want to do it live. But even text-to-speeching out loud, word by word, people for the most part ignore you. Maybe eventually they will figure out that you’re trying to say something, but then whatever you are trying to say is already too far behind in the conversation, and they move on without you.
Thus, the only strategy I found to work for group conversations is to leave (you can steal one person), or to accept you’re not going to be part of the conversation. You can listen, or you can take a role where you’re just laying back and getting head scratches from the people.
The only exception is in a format where everyone is looking at you and asking you specific questions about a topic, and other people are mostly listening and trying to give you more questions. But this is rare.
With a group of close friends is the most heartbreaking
If you spend time on your own, do not get too excited about spending time with a group of close friends you haven’t seen talked to anyone in a while. You might have planned a trip with some expectations of a good time from memories of normal interactions. But these are not normal interactions, so do not expect it to be such.
Things will happen like “oh i want to know this person better, they are asking me questions, yet my hands are cold and typing on my phone while walking sucks so i can’t answer anything in detail” or “someone who knows you well might subtly misrepresent your views in a group conversation, and you will have the urge to respond, and not be able to”. All individual of these is fine and benign, but they will compound rapidly.
If you end up spending days together, you will need to really learn to be resilient to these kinds of things adding up. I was not and ended up breaking down and crying, but after I recovered I guess I grew mentally stronger… maybe… it was all internal mind games in my head and I got better at dealing with these things.
Google Docs are Easier and Under-explored
One thing which I wish I tried sooner was communicating via writing Google Docs. You could just have one person start a conversation by writing some topic they want to talk about or think about or ask questions about.
Based on this, then subsequently try to spend some time responding to people’s comments. You can move around, and people read as you write and come up with more comments and think about things. If everyone is combined and writing in the same doc, then you are not disadvantaged.
It’s an interesting communication style and definitely leads to thinking about different things than you would in more conventional conversations. So this seems very ripe for exploitation if you can’t speak, so I wish I did it more
Back to Speaking is so nice
Being able to speak again is much nicer. It was mostly pretty smooth.
I guess I lost some skills I had in multi-turn conversations, but I’ve slowly been trending them again and it’s been fine.
All methods (other than sign language?) kinda suck. People can notice the benefits of switching to a different but miss the disadvantages… which i guess makes sense. Eg: People claim to prefer hearing full-sentence TTS, but also want responses sooner, which is only possible with word-by-word.
Another takeaway, is not able to speak sucks, and all methods of communication are significantly slower than speech. So I’ve started using speech to text significantly more. I haven’t fully optimized the setup yet. I have some things I’ve been trying, and this article first draft was mostly written using speech-to-text.
Lastly, idk, you can feel self-conscious about needing to be accommodated for, and yeah people do find it more effortful to need to provide accommodations, but people will feel like they want to help you if you do have asks. You should just not feel guilty about it1
easier said than done… i also don’t have arguments that are convincing to me either >~< and i guess it’s a case of equal and opposite advice.