Bis ans Ende der Welt: The Long Memory of Gestalts

Autistic identity, multilingual processing, and the fading fluency of stored gestalts

A reflection on the quiet grief of losing spontaneous access to the gestalts that once lived on my tongue—multilingual, autistic, a GLP watching treasured scripts fade with time, but still reaching for truth.

Introduction

It was billed as professional development, but the tone said otherwise. From the moment we walked in, it was clear this was a sales pitch in disguise—one of those sessions where the presenter has been trained not in pedagogy but in persuasion, fluent in a particular dialect of buzzwords, hooks, and exaggerated promises. I was already struggling to hold on—overstimulated, cognitively adrift, the pace too fast, the logic too slippery. The slides clicked by like a magic trick: “engagement,” “discussion techniques,” “productivity.” I could feel the disconnect growing, the performance expectation thick in the room, the unspoken pressure to nod along. By the end, when the presenter asked each of us to write a single word about our experience—just one—I could tell there was a script behind the ask. An implied purpose. A moment where we’d each offer up a little linguistic token she could spin into further praise for the product. Everyone else seemed to understand the assignment. Perhaps my brain did too, just not in the same way.

My hand moved before I could second-guess it. Nützlich. The word surfaced fully formed, complete. German. Precise. Whole. It was true, in a way—useful. The kind of word that fits the shape of a truth you can’t quite say aloud in polite company. I wrote it on the card and set it down, feeling some small inner click of rightness. Then she got to mine. She paused. Stumbled. Frowned slightly. “Nuts… lish?” she read aloud, unsure. “What does this one mean?” I answered plainly: “It means ‘useful.’” She blinked, smiled a bit too tightly, and moved on, unable to weave it into her patter.

This is not a story about defiance. It’s a story about survival, about the moments when language is all we have to hang onto. It’s about being seen as cold, rude, uncooperative—when in truth, we are just trying to stay afloat.

Scene: The PD Session

The room was set up like a cheery trap—tables arranged just-so, piles of laminated handouts, colourful posters tacked to portable whiteboards, and a speaker headset mic on the presenter’s cheek that made everything feel like an infomercial. The tone was upbeat, performative, carefully choreographed to feel like empowerment. The reality was something else entirely. She was there to sell us on Kagan Strategies, which she described as a way to “get your students up, talking, sharing, and owning their learning.” In practice, it meant forced pair-and-share exercises, shout-outs, hand signals, and a relentless rhythm of activity designed to keep the room bright, busy, and loud. Every technique came with a name—like a game show segment—and every demonstration felt like a scene from a show I hadn’t agreed to attend.

But the real giveaway was the upsell. Slides slipped in between activity demos with QR codes, order forms, and “teacher bundle” options. If we ordered “consumables” together as a site, she told us, we’d get free shipping. The school wasn’t paying for anything—these were classroom tools we were expected to buy ourselves. But we could make it “fun!” by teaming up and saving a few quid on postage. There were smiles all around, but they didn’t reach the eyes. The unspoken truth sat heavy beneath the surface: this wasn’t training. It was a pitch. And we were the marks.

The pressure to participate—to mirror enthusiasm, to perform engagement—was immense. We were told to get up and practise the strategies, to “move and mingle,” to pretend we were teenagers in need of social scaffolding. Every time I stood up, my nervous system recoiled. The noise, the pace, the unnatural cheer—it was like being hit with weather I wasn’t dressed for. And yet, I moved through it, barely. By the end, I had long since run out of spoons. I was past pretending to enjoy it. I was holding on, just trying to keep my body in the room and my face in some semblance of neutrality.

Then came the final task: “Write down one word that describes your experience today.” Just one. I stared at the card. My mind, fried and fluttering, didn’t reach for reflection. It reached for safety. And then—like a well-worn phrase from a much older scene—there it was: nützlich. A word from my Heidelberg years. It slipped forward into my verbal field, not chosen but offered, clean and whole. Useful. Yes. That would do. But in my memory, it also held bite. It was the word you used when someone had served their purpose, when something was technically functional but spiritually hollow. My GLP brain had handed me the perfect insult, thinly veiled as praise, auf Deutsch.

Reflection: Why Nützlich?

Why nützlich? Because in that moment, it was the only word that fit. On the surface, it means “useful”—benign, even complimentary. A tidy response. Respectable. But underneath, it carried far more than its dictionary definition. It came layered with memory, emotion, and tone. The kind of word that, depending on inflection, can hold warmth or wield contempt. In my mind, it arrived not as translation but as complete phrase: the tone, the context, the slight tightening of the jaw as it’s said. Nützlich—not glowing praise, but a closing gesture. Efficient. Dismissive. “You did the job. That’ll do.”

This is the part that always seems to catch the neuro-majority off guard—the way a multilingual autistic GLP like me doesn’t simply “know words in different languages,” but shifts entire dialects and speech registers depending on the emotional gestalt. I don’t speak German with a Westie accent or English with a German inflection—I code-switch into full Heidelberger. That’s the nature of GLP speech: gestalts aren’t just words, they’re complete experiential units. The rhythm, the mouthfeel, the social register, the body posture—they’re all part of the package. If the phrase doesn’t feel right, if it doesn’t match the emotional resonance stored in my body, it won’t come out.

And nützlich felt right. It had that familiar emotional texture from my years in Heidelberg in the early 1990s—a time when I didn’t yet know I was autistic, and before the language of things like “spoon theory” existed. So no, I don’t say “Ich habe keine Löffel mehr.” That gestalt doesn’t live in me. But “Ich bin am Ende”—I am at the end—that lives deep in my bones. Sometimes, “Ich hab keine Lust”—not a direct translation, but a bodily one. No more will, no more bandwidth, no more performative cheer.

The word nützlich emerged from that same deep well. It captured what I couldn’t express aloud—that I’d been reduced in that PD session to a consumer, a data point, a vaguely smiling object being nudged toward a checkout page. But the word also performed an act of subtle resistance. It was so economical, so restrained, that it couldn’t be criticised. It didn’t trigger a scene. It just didn’t land the way she expected. It glitched the script.

And that’s the beauty and burden of being a GLP in a world that prizes performance: when I say a word, I’m not choosing from a menu—I’m reaching into a layered, multidimensional archive. I don’t say things because they’re expected. I say them because they’re true. And sometimes, the truth comes in German.

Reframe: The Autistic Perception

What startled me most in that moment wasn’t the presenter’s confusion—it was my own word. Nützlich. It came so suddenly, so cleanly, so perfectly formed. Not translated, not reasoned through. Just… there. Whole. My GLP brain served it up like a well-worn tile from the mosaic of my lived experience, placed precisely into the gap where a word was needed. And I was startled because that kind of spontaneity, especially in German, has become rarer with time.

In the early years, back when I lived in Heidelberg, German lived close to the surface. I used it every day—not just practically, but socially, emotionally, sensorially. I absorbed phrases not as vocabulary but as experiences, layered with sound, intonation, context, memory. I didn’t speak German about my life—I lived parts of my life in German. It mattered that Ich bin am Ende sounded the way it did. It mattered that Ich hab keine Lust carried a particular shrug, a soft refusal of the world’s demands. These weren’t just phrases. They were affective gestures. They felt right in the mouth and in the body.

A very young me outside of Universität Heidelberg, with Dr. Bunsen.

But the years since have stretched that language further from reach. Without German-speaking friends, without regular conversation, the ease of retrieval has faded. And whilst most people assume multilingualism is like riding a bike, for GLPs, it’s more like unearthing an old cassette—worn, fragile, sometimes inaudible. If the emotional gestalt isn’t available, neither is the phrase. I can’t just conjure German on command. It has to feel right. It has to arrive.

So when nützlich appeared unbidden—perfect in its shape and tone—it brought with it not just precision, but a bittersweet joy. It reminded me that somewhere inside me, that language still lives. That part of me who lived in Heidelberg still surfaces when needed. Even now. Even in a school conference room in California, decades later, as I flinched beneath fluorescent lights and the chirp of a sales pitch disguised as professional development.

That small joy, that moment of internal rightness, existed even as the presenter stumbled over the word. Even as others around me offered their carefully packaged responses. What looked like aloofness was, in truth, something more sacred: the surprise of feeling momentarily whole. The unexpected sense that, even when I was too overloaded to respond in the language expected of me, my mind still knew how to answer in a way that fit. And that fittingness—however inscrutable to others—was a quiet, wordless comfort. A flash of continuity in a room built on performance.

Yes, I had reached my limit. Yes, I was done performing. But in that space of overwhelm, a piece of my past reached back to steady me. And that’s not defiance. That’s grace.

Cultural Layers

Words are never just words. Not for me. Not for many autistic people, especially gestalt language processors. Each phrase is like a time capsule—its meaning inseparable from its first use, its first tone, its first emotional context. Gestalts don’t come abstracted; they come complete. When I speak, I’m not just using language—I’m recalling a memory, a moment, a shape of feeling that got attached to those particular syllables. Every word is a breadcrumb leading back to a scene.

Take Tschüß—a simple enough goodbye, until you dress it up with und. The first time I used und Tschüß, I thought I was being cheerful. Playful, even. I was still new to Heidelberg, still thinking in English but speaking in German. The man I said it to, a very proper, rather buttoned-up colleague, raised his eyebrow at me with visible offence. I was mortified. Later, he gently explained what I’d accidentally said—something closer to “and good riddance” than “cheerio.” I apologised profusely. And yet, that moment of accidental rudeness became the start of an unlikely friendship. He taught me tone, I taught him timing. In that way only language can, a mistake became a bridge.

Years later, in Texas, I had to decode another phrase that doesn’t mean what it says: “Bless her heart.” I kept trying to back-translate it into English, but it wasn’t English I needed—it was emotional German. Eventually, I landed on Ach, schön… Not literally equivalent, but emotionally adjacent. That same sharp softness. That smile with barbed wire behind it. I remember standing in a grocery store car park in Ft. Worth, hearing someone drawl “Well, bless her heart,” and suddenly thinking, Ah, schön… ja. I know this dance.

And then there’s tabarnak. Québecois French didn’t come into my life until my forensic years, working alongside a border agent who had the filthiest mouth I’d ever encountered—and the biggest grin. He took great delight in teaching me just how many ways a devoutly Catholic culture could rewire the sacred into the profane. Câlisse, ostie, viarge—each one a little rebellion against reverence. I’d never seen someone use holy objects as punctuation before. But I loved it. He’d belt out a string of sacres during tedious casework, and I’d sit there giggling, marvelling at how flexible language could be when it grew up under pressure.

Each of these phrases lives in me still, not just as words, but as snapshots. The embarrassed flush of an unintended insult. The dawning realisation in a Texan heatwave. The joyful irreverence of a Québecois lab. My gestalts are albums, not dictionaries. I can’t pull them apart and still have them make sense. They carry their moments with them.

For people like me, language isn’t just how we speak. It’s how we remember. How we navigate. How we stay stitched together when the world frays at the seams.

Bis ans ende der Welt

Sometimes, I mourn the drift.
Not the grammar—I was never too fussed about cases—
but the reach.
That soft, widening distance between me
and the phrases that once came quickly,
like breath.

German was the first language I reached for
not because I had to,
but because I wanted to.
It was my choice.
My rebellion.
My curiosity.

It began in a living room in Whittier.
Every time we visited,
the same phrase would trail behind us like a shadow:
„Helmut, versteck das Silberbesteck, die mexikanischen Jungs sind da.“
Helmut, hide the silverware—the Mexican boys are here.
A joke, they said.
A joke, meant to land softly.

But even then, something in me felt the weight of it—
not the meaning (not yet),
but the texture.
The rhythm.
The way the woman’s lips curled around the words.

I carried it home, wrote it down phonetically,
and pored over dictionaries, phrasebooks, scraps of syntax.
GLP-style decoding: not word by word,
but shape by shape.
And when I cracked it,
when the meaning unfolded like a bitter fruit in my hands,
I sat stunned.

Then I wrote my reply.

„Schon gut, gnädige Frau, ich bin Schotte. Sie sollten lieber Ihren Whisky verstecken.“
It’s alright, madam—I’m Scottish. You’d best hide your whisky.

The next visit, I said it without flinching.
Her face—tight, unready—twitched with surprise,
and then broke into that beautiful, unwilling laughter,
the kind that comes from being caught out
by someone you didn’t think could understand.

I learned something that day—
about words,
about power,
about how language can shield,
can strike,
can reclaim.

Now, decades on, the German comes slower.
Some phrases feel like they live underwater—
visible, but just out of reach.
And that saddens me.

Because my gestalts aren’t just words—
they are places.
They are moments.
Each one carries me back
to who I was when I learned it.
Each one is a hand reaching backward through time.

Still, they surface when I need them most.
In stress. In joy.
In moments like nützlich,
offered like a pebble from the tide.

They stay with me.
Even as the world shifts around me.
Even as the scripts change.

Bis ans Ende der Welt.
To the ends of the earth.
That’s where they’ll follow me.
Not as tools,
but as friends.
Guides.
Ghosts.
And sometimes—if I’m lucky—
a good punchline.

Final thoughts ..

I didn’t mean to disrupt the script. I wasn’t trying to be clever or contrarian. I was exhausted—unprepared, overwhelmed, and doing my best to stay present in a session that felt more like a sales funnel than a space for learning. And when the moment came to offer a word, just one word to summarise it all, I didn’t reach for anything. My mind offered nützlich. A single syllable of truth that didn’t play along.

That word didn’t land the way the presenter wanted it to. It didn’t affirm. It didn’t shine. It didn’t slide easily into her closing pitch. But it was real. And it was mine. It held everything I’d felt but couldn’t yet articulate—the transaction beneath the training, the performative nature of participation, the sense that I was expected to smile and nod as a consumer, not a colleague.

Maybe nützlich broke the rhythm of the day.
Maybe it didn’t fit her narrative.
But it fit mine.

And maybe—just maybe—that small moment of misalignment was the most honest thing that happened in the entire session.

I didn’t come to that PD to play a part.
I came as I was: autistic, a GLP, with limited spoons and a deep commitment to truth.
And in the moment when I had nothing left to give,
my mind gave me the one word that held it all.

Nützlich.
Not rude.
Not defiant.
Just true.