How one neurodivergent’s quest for plain speech started with reading.

To my parents’ chagrin, I didn’t speak as a youngster.

I wasn’t mute per se, I just couldn’t access the words I needed or bring them forth. I did a great deal of nodding and shaking my head, utilized finger-pointing and pantomiming to make myself understood, and when all else failed, and Mama was at her wit’s end, I would begrudgingly utter a few words. Needless to say, I play a mean game of charades today. 

More often than not, neurodiversity presents itself in life’s early developmental stages. I wasn’t officially diagnosed with auditory processing difficulties, dyscalculia, and ADHD until I was an adult. But it is clear to me today that a host of underlying neurodiverse features, ones I had become adept at masking as an adult, manifested themselves colorfully when I was a child.

Coined by Judy Singer, a sociologist on the autism spectrum, the term “neurodiversity” burst into the zeitgeist in 1997. It is used in lieu of descriptive detractors like “disability” or deficit when differences in the social, physical, and verbal traits arise. The term includes, but is not limited to, diagnoses such as autism, ADHD, and tourette’s syndrome, as well as learning disabilities such as dyslexia and dyscalculia. 

I learned to read early, or so I’m told. And according to Mama, that’s all I ever did: read. I read daily. I read upon awakening and often late into the night. I read because it was the only time I could make sense of what was going on. It seemed as though my parents, siblings, and everybody else were members of a secret club, with a secret handshake and even a secret language. And try though I did, I would somehow fail the handshake, fail to follow the simplest of instructions, laugh at inopportune times, or even worse, not laugh when I was supposed to. Always wrong, an errant lego piece from a forgotten set, I did not fit, I was not needed, and I was certainly not wanted.

So I retreated into a world other than my own. And within otherworldly realms dueling with marauders, slaying arcs, and rescuing damsels while weaving straw into gold, I found my words.

It was 1981; I was 10 and friendless. To be fair, I longed to hang out with my peers, to laugh with instead of being laughed at. Instead, I hung out where I felt most comfortable — the school library. There I came upon “Hollywood Wives,” and so naturally, I devoured it in one sitting. What a way to get introduced to the birds and the bees. No wading into the shallow end for this prepubescent; instead, I was hurled into the deep end of sexuality by the graphic, gratuitous sex scenes Jackie Collins used to titillate her readers.

V.C. Andrews and her psychologically claustrophobic “Flowers In the Attic,” a family psychodrama depicting the horrors of unchecked child abuse wim a nasty dollop of sibling incest, made my own family dysfunction appear tame in comparison. 

When my father smacked me over the head with my book of the day, which just so happened to be J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” he dispelled the adage “words can’t hurt you.” Because, I’ll tell you, those words hurt and left a good-sized lump behind, too. Lump-sized Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit homebody turned hero, channeled his inner warrior and became a legend because he dared. This daring changed everything; instead of a reader and writer of deeds, he became a doer.

“Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret,” Judy Blume’s tongue-in-cheek nod to burgeoning female sexuality and its hyperfocus on the vermilion shroud of menstruation almost shocked me back into speechlessness. Nevertheless, I connected with her protagonist’s feelings of alienation.

I read because it was the only time I could make sense of what was going on. It seemed as though my parents, siblings, everybody was a member of a secret club, with a secret handshake and even a secret language.

“The Prime of Miss Jean Brody” introduced me to a heroine born before her time. Her shock and awe methods of attempting to mold adolescent female minds may not raise eyebrows today; however, the tapestry of homoerotic undertones woven throughout her narrative raised the question: are these tomorrow’s independent women or lesbian Lolitas? Daring, courageous, and committed, her character showed me how pushing the envelope using both authenticity and subterfuge eased her journey towards self-actualization and so paved the way for her youthful charges to follow suit.

Of course, I was a late bloomer. Why wouldn’t I be? I was an outlier in every sense of the word. Adolescent hormones, plus wanting to belong so badly it hurt, led me to do what a “normal” teenager would do. I feigned disinterest. But I was also learning; I watched and I studied. What would a humanoid from another galaxy do to pass for human? I thought I had found the answer. Outfit? Check. A smile? Check. Eye contact? Check. And above all, if you don’t understand — pretend.

By the time I turned 15, there was no denying I was different. Today, I would have been recognized for the neurodivergent I clearly was. It wasn’t as clear back then.

I thought I read because I loved stories. Today, I know I read because I was more comfortable with fictional characters than I was with the people I coexisted with, up to and including my own family. A Dickensian orphan, nose pressed against the window pane of my life, I existed in the periphery — sometimes seen, rarely heard — surprisingly never lonely.

No, I was busy, hands full. There was never a dull moment when an adventure was only a book bag away. In books, I always knew the right thing to say, the right thing to do, and in the nick of time, when all seemed lost, when all hope had been ceded, I always saved the day.

In books, I discovered the sin of semantics, the subtlety of subtext, the tone of tact, and above all, the need for nuance. I began to understand that human dialogue was nothing like the clarity afforded to prose by crisp editing — very rarely do humans say exactly what they mean and only what they mean. More often than not, human dialogue meanders, getting lost along labyrinthine corridors strewn with unintentional gaffs, fraught with faux pas, and muddied by misguided intent.

Being voluntarily nonverbal was doing nothing for me, and expecting human communication to match the scripted texts within books was unrealistic. I had to channel the nerve I so admired in the characters in the books I read, to venture out courageously, stop pretending to be one of them, and just be me. The hardest lesson I learned and had to accept was the fact that emotions don’t stop at the end of a sentence, feelings don’t dissipate at the conclusion of a paragraph — that emotions are messy, contagious, and inherently human.

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Sagal Sadiq writes from Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, California. Sadiq serves as the features editor on the incarcerated-run newspaper, CCWF Paper Trail.