How does language acquisition work if you're 'non-verbal?'

If language acquisition is the psychological term for the process by which we learn to use language, how do so-called 'non-verbal autistics' acquire their first language?

A re-framing of language acquisition from the lens of an autistic gestalt processor—challenging behaviourist myths, critical-period panic, and cure thinking, and instead centring time, solidarity, and communication in all its forms.

Introduction

Do you know what word you first spoke? Do you know when you spoke it, who heard it, what expression crossed their face as the sound left your mouth? Have you ever tried to count how many words you’ve gathered since—how many you’ve worn smooth with use, how many you’ve abandoned because they never quite fit? Psychologists sometimes estimate that neurotypical people learn roughly 3,500 words a year from their first to their thirtieth birthday—a tidy figure that makes language sound like an annual harvest rather than a messy, lived process. It’s a comforting story because it suggests order, sequence, predictability. Babble turns to words, words to phrases, phrases to narrative. Researchers map this growth, plot it on charts, and call it acquisition.

But what about those of us called non-verbal—what about the children who do not arrive on schedule to the party of speech, or who show up by a different road entirely? What language do we acquire, when, and how? The dominant story has very little to say here beyond deficits and delays, as though silence were an absence rather than another grammar; as though a different route through language were not language at all. The textbooks are written for the majority—built, often without malice but with great consequence, on observations of neurotypical infants and children. Behaviourists narrate learning as conditioning—pairings and reinforcements that turn sound into meaning and meaning into behaviour. Parents smile, a baby says “dada,” reward flows, a circuit closes. Later, linguists counter that something more innate must be at work, that children generalise rules they’ve never been explicitly taught, that a device of sorts must be humming in the background to make such rapid mastery possible. Around these poles—environment and endowment—theories bloom. Critical periods are proposed, ages drawn like borders on a map, after which the terrain of language supposedly grows inhospitable.

I don’t recite this canon to rehearse the usual lesson. I recite it because it sets the architecture of the institutions we meet—schools, clinics, research labs, funding bodies. These frameworks don’t merely describe language; they allocate credibility, design interventions, and define what counts as progress. When Skinner and successors assumed a universal subject, they effectively centred a single developmental path and cast all others as deviation. When Chomsky argued for a universal grammar, the universality quietly skipped over minds like mine. Even the well-meaning critical period story becomes weaponised—if we miss the window, we are told, we must be hurried through it or left behind the glass forever.

Here is where I begin. I am autistic (AuDHD). I am a gestalt processor (GLP). “Non-verbal” once sat in my records because my speech did not arrive when and how the milestones demanded (ASD—Level 2 Support Needs: significant impairment in functional language). But “non-verbal” is not the same as “non-vocal,” and neither of those labels capture the way my mind moves. I did not start life with the house language already installed; I learned it, painstakingly, as a second system, whilst another semiotic—richer, multi-layered, scene-based—was already alive and well. In fact, I did not acquire any language as if by instinct—every tongue I carry I have learned through gestalts, five of them in all, though English and German are the ones in which I am most capable. When I write to you now, I am translating across grammars. I am making myself legible in a language that was never designed with me in mind. If you’ve ever tried to pour a river into a jug, you’ll know something of the labour.

So no, this isn’t a neutral tour through developmental psychology. It’s a reminder that the concepts we inherit are never innocent—they’re situated in power, in what gets funded, in which children are measured and how. When we describe neurotypical language acquisition as if it were simply human language acquisition, we erase the rest of us. When we treat echolalia as pathology, we miss that for many it’s a scaffold—a way to build bridges between internal meaning and external speech. When we speak of “late talkers” as if lateness were failure, we ignore that different temporalities exist—that for some of us, fluency may arrive in writing first, or decades later in speech, or not at all because our best language isn’t vocal.

If you grew up along the textbook path, none of this is an accusation. It’s an invitation to widen the frame. Keep your milestones if they help you organise what you see—but do not mistake them for a universal template. A child chattering at four months is real. So is the child whose language is gestural, musical, patterned in scripts that carry feeling long before they carry phonemes. So is the teenager whose first true fluency is typed at midnight in a quiet room. So is the adult who speaks in scenes and needs time—real time—to distil them into words another can hear. The question, then, is not simply how neurotypical children acquire language. The question is whose stories get to define what language is, and whose grammars we will learn to recognise when they do not sound like our own.

Theories of Acquisition (Skinner, Chomsky, Critical Period)

Behaviourism offered one of the first sweeping explanations of language. For Skinner and his acolytes, speech was behaviour, nothing more, nothing less. Stimulus, response, reinforcement—the same mechanics that trained pigeons to peck keys could, he believed, explain how a child learned to talk. As before, the baby babbles “dada,” the parents smile, attention flows, the sound is repeated, and over time the babble is shaped into words, words into sentences, sentences into a semblance of fluency. In 1957 he published Verbal Behaviour, a book that set out to codify this theory in detail—defining “mands” (requests), “tacts” (labels), “echoics,” “intraverbals,” and so on. To Skinner, language was a taxonomy of operant functions, each a behavioural category to be reinforced or extinguished as needed.

What is striking is not merely that Verbal Behaviour still exists, but that it remains a cornerstone of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), the dominant therapy applied to autistic children in the United States and exported globally. Behaviour analysts still memorise Skinner’s taxonomy, still cite his book as scripture, still use it to justify the idea that language can be “taught” by breaking it into behavioural fragments and rewarding correct performance. Its popularity rests on three pillars: it is easy to operationalise, it produces measurable outputs, and it promises parents and policymakers a kind of certainty—that non-speaking children can be made to speak if only the right reinforcements are applied. For systems obsessed with data and compliance, Verbal Behaviour offers a neat package: behaviours can be counted, graphs can be drawn, progress can be reported.

But neatness is not truth. For gestalt processors, Skinner’s framework is not only unfit—it is actively harmful. Our language does not emerge as discrete operants that can be shaped like clay under the hand of a therapist. We do not begin with “mands” and “tacts”; we begin with wholes—with echoes, scripts, scenes that carry affect and context all at once. To demand that we produce single words on cue, to withhold reward until a sound is made “appropriately,” is to mistake our very mode of meaning-making as failure. Echolalia, for us, is not a broken step on the way to “real” language—it is language. Yet in ABA, echolalia is treated as something to be extinguished, a “non-functional” behaviour to be corrected. The result is that GLP children are pushed to abandon their natural routes into communication, forced instead into analytic fragments that neither reflect how they think nor allow them to flourish.

Chomsky himself famously dismantled Skinner’s account in a 1959 review, arguing that behaviourism could never explain the creativity of language. Children say things they have never heard; they generate rules, test them, break them. Something more than conditioning must be at work. And yet, whilst Chomsky’s critique reshaped linguistics, ABA carried on as though nothing had changed. Behaviourists doubled down, not because the science was strong, but because the method produced outcomes that could be tallied and sold. Clinics could bill hours. Policymakers could point to “evidence-based practice.” Parents desperate for speech could be promised a cure.

The critical period hypothesis extended the same logic of exclusion. Researchers asked whether there was a window in which language must be learned, beyond which fluency would never come. Children, they noted, seemed to master new tongues with greater ease than adults—accents lighter, grammar swifter, vocabulary broader. And so the story hardened: catch it early, intervene fast, close the gap before the window shuts. For GLPs, this narrative is a trap. It ignores that our timelines differ, that we may not enter the world of spoken or written language until years or decades later, or that our most fluent communication may remain in non-vocal forms. The “window” is not a biological fact—it is a disciplinary fiction, used to hurry us into therapies that neither recognise nor respect our processing.

Taken together—Skinner’s operants, Chomsky’s device, the critical period—they still structure the systems we meet today. They define what is counted as delay, what is labelled deficit, what is targeted for intervention. They prescribe a universal path that never described us, and they punish deviation as disorder. For gestalt processors, the tragedy is that our ways of learning—through scenes, echoes, affective gestalts—are rendered invisible by the very theories meant to explain language. Theories that could have been provisional have become dogma, shaping not just research but the lived realities of children coerced into programmes designed to normalise them. And so the question is not whether Skinner or Chomsky were right in their own terms—it is whether we will continue to let their universals dictate the fate of those of us who were never included in their universes at all.

Where We Don’t Fit

So what happens when the neat theories of behaviourism, Chomsky’s universals, and the critical period are applied to populations they were never meant to describe? We are told, over and over, that our brains are broken—deficient copies of a neurotypical template. Behaviourist literature insists that autistic children face “failure to acquire speech,” that without intervention we will remain “non-verbal,” as though silence or difference were proof of pathology. ABA manuals cite Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour as gospel, reducing communication to a set of operants that must be drilled, prompted, reinforced until they approximate the speech of others. Autism Speaks repeats this script on its website with cheerful certainty, telling parents that “Verbal Behaviour Therapy teaches communication,” when what it really teaches is mimicry and compliance. The assumption is never that we might be whole already, never that our communication exists in forms beyond their categories—only that we must be repaired.

This is where words matter. “Non-verbal” is a label pinned to many of us, yet it obscures more than it reveals. To be “non-vocal” is simply to lack speech—or to lack it at certain times, under certain pressures. To be “non-verbal,” in the way professionals use it, is to be cast outside language itself, as if our minds were mute and empty. But I have always had language. I did not acquire—I learned it, painstakingly, in multiple tongues through gestalts, five in total, with English and German as the ones I command most fluently and frequently. My language was never the linear fragments behaviourism rewards. It was—and is—gestalt: whole scenes, echoes, intonations, rhythms, meanings saturated with affect and context. We replay, recombine, reshape these gestalts until new sense emerges. To call that “non-verbal” is not just inaccurate—it is erasure, a refusal to see us on our own terms.

And this difference is not a quibble, not semantic nitpicking—it is survival. If clinicians assume we are non-verbal in essence, they design interventions to force speech at all costs. Echolalia is treated as a nuisance to be extinguished. Scripts are rewritten into “functional” mands and tacts. Rewards are doled out for every approximation of analytic speech, as if compliance were the measure of communication. Yet what they call pathology is often our scaffolding. Echolalia is how many of us bridge inner worlds with outer words. Repeated lines are how we anchor ourselves in storms of social noise. These are not broken stutters on the way to language—they are language itself, the way gestalt processors learn, hold, and share meaning.

To seed this truth early is vital, because without it the whole story collapses into caricature. If you imagine that I began with nothing, then my metaphors—barrels and shot glasses, rivers poured into jugs—sound like poetic flourishes. But I did not begin with nothing. My earliest gestalts came from my Scottish grandmother and her love of the BBC—cadences of radio voices, snatches of programmes, the intonation of her own speech. Later, through my childhood years in school (K–6), my gestalts multiplied into a multilingual chorus: English, German, Russian, Armenian, Spanish. All of these were spoken, not read or written, absorbed whole from the environments around me. My first deliberate attempt to learn a language in any systematic way came in German—German was the language I studied first, and only after that did I learn English as something more than an echo or a script. Each of these tongues entered through gestalts, through wholes stitched together rather than analytic fragments stacked like bricks. To understand me, and those like me, you must first discard the fiction of the broken brain and recognise that our languages were always there—just not the ones you expected, and not the ones you chose to reward. What Autism Speaks and its kin describe as absence is, in truth, presence they refuse to acknowledge.

How It Feels

How it feels is rarely neat. My mind holds gestalts the way others hold vocabularies—whole constellations of meaning gathered through living, not lists of words memorised by rote. Each language I carry has its own gravity. German, with its precision, became the way I navigated science and technology. Unlike English, where a single word can wobble across multiple meanings, German insists—mostly—that one word means one thing. When I worked as a forensic scientist, translating technical manuals from Chinese into German produced clarity, accuracy, sense. The same manuals rendered into English were riddled with confusion, lost in the swamp of homonyms and idioms. For me, German remains the language of structure, of accuracy, of systems that must hold.

Russian, by contrast, lives in my body. It is the language of sport, of wrestling mats and Sambo drills, of the flowing violence and discipline of Systema. I know the alphabet well enough to sound out words, to recognise names on a poster, but I could not navigate a Russian city unaided. What I do hold are the gestalts of movement, of commentary, of watching heroes like Aleksandr Karelin, Fedor Emelianenko, Vladimir Vasiliev. Russian sits in my muscles, not my pen.

Armenian came through the local expat community, survivors’ descendants who carried a lyrical cadencing of speech into their homes and kitchens. I grew up among their grandchildren, invited to tables where the language filled the air with music even when I didn’t understand the semantics. To me, Armenian is warmth and hospitality, of Lori cheese, and the cadence of grief and survival transmuted into beauty.

Spanish, of course, is the pulse of Los Angeles—the default tongue of playgrounds, buses, markets, construction sites. It is the soundscape of my city, the language that situates me in place, whether or not I am fluent enough to carry it forward.

And all of this—German precision, Russian sport, Armenian lyric, Spanish street—must be poured into the 50cl shot glass of English when I attempt to speak. Each gestalt is a 150-litre barrel, heavy with associations, contexts, histories. To answer even a simple question means shifting and tipping these barrels, combining, decanting, hoping not to spill too much in the process. This is why conversation can feel like hauling casks across a warehouse floor—laborious, consuming, exhausting. After forty hours of training, teaching, or public speaking, I am not just tired; I am emptied out. It takes a week to refill, to steady the barrels again.

This is not deficiency—it is the lived texture of being a gestalt processor. To speak is to wrestle rivers into jugs, to strain entire histories into sentences, to compress layers of meaning into a space that was never built to hold them.

Echolalia as Order

Echolalia, for me, was never the pathology the textbooks warned about—it was my scaffolding, the first beams and planks of a house I was still learning how to inhabit. I gathered phrases the way other children gathered toys—bright, ready-made, endlessly reusable. They were scripts, yes, but also charms, little spells I could cast to open doors, to earn smiles, to step into scenes where otherwise I would have remained invisible.

The Sadie Hawkins dance is my favourite example—half-comedy, half-tragedy, and wholly a lesson in what happens when scaffolding meets nuance. I adored dancing, the way music lifted me out of myself, so when the first girl asked if I would go, my response was quick and rehearsed: “Yes.” It worked—she smiled, scene completed. Then the second girl asked, and I reached for the same script: “Yes.” Another smile, another success. When the third asked, I gave the same line, the same tone, the same certainty that I had chosen correctly. After all, echolalia had taught me this: if a line works, repeat it.

What I didn’t realise—what no echo had prepared me for—was that “Yes” did not mean the same thing in each mouth that asked it. To me, it was a simple affirmation, a ticket to the dance floor. To them, it carried exclusivity, a contract implied but never spoken. So when all three arrived at the dance around the same time and saw me, the moment became a kind of surreal theatre. Imagine a spotlight, three furious faces, and me centre-stage with no script at all, my mind riffling through barrels of language and finding nothing that fit. I wasn’t Casanova—I was a teenager caught between rehearsed lines and uncharted improvisation.

Looking back, I can laugh at the absurdity—the way my earnest echoes led me into a scene straight out of farce. But I also see it as liminal, that thin space between belonging and bewilderment. Echolalia had carried me across the threshold—it had given me entry—but once inside, it wobbled, unable to bear the layered meanings of romance, friendship, exclusivity. The scaffolding held just long enough to get me in the door, then collapsed in a clatter.

Pathologists would have written it up as evidence of deficit—failure of pragmatics, disordered communication. Yet I know it differently. Those repeated “Yeses” were not emptiness; they were full of intention, joy, hope, the desire to be part of something. Echolalia was my bridge, and if it led me into comedic disaster, it also led me somewhere at all. Without those echoes, there would have been only silence, no dance, no stage, no story to tell decades later with a smile. What the professionals call disorder, I remember as a kind of order-in-progress—clumsy, liminal, but alive, a voice stretching itself toward the world.

The Classroom Now

The classroom is where theory becomes flesh, where the abstractions of psychology and the promises of policy land in the lives of young people who are asked, every day, to perform according to rules that were never written with them in mind. I stand at the front of rooms filled with brilliance—gestalt processors, analytic processors, children who weave both together—and I watch how the system tries to pin them down with numbers, scores, boxes ticked in red pen. What it misses is the shimmer, the liminality of students who live inside the school but are rarely seen by it.

There is the student who says little out loud, whose test scores mark them as “below basic,” but who, when given the chance to write at their own pace, pours out entire constellations of thought—layered, lyrical, unteachable by ordinary standards. There is the student who repeats phrases from films or TikTok clips in the middle of algebra, and the teacher down the hall rolls their eyes, calls it distraction, when in fact those echoes are commentary, connection, critique. These children shine when you learn how to read their signals—when you understand that language is not only what comes out cleanly in timed essays or oral reports.

Testing regimes are merciless in their blindness. They measure the ability to perform analytic fragments under pressure, as though that were the only form of intelligence. A GLP student who can hold three languages in her body, who can sing in her grandmother’s Nahuatl and banter in her father’s Spanish and write her dreams of college in English for a classroom journal, is flattened into a single number. The brilliance of their non-linear thought—the way they connect themes across subjects, the way they remember by scene and sound rather than by list—is written off as “scatter,” “inattention,” “off-task.” What the test calls disorder, I see as a different order, one that rarely fits into the Scantron bubbles.

And yet, there are moments—quiet, luminous—when a student who has been marked as deficient is given space, and they bloom. A girl who never raised her hand in class composes an essay on grief that leaves the room silent. A boy who failed the state reading exam reads aloud from a manga, voice shifting character to character, and the class laughs with joy. A student marked “low” on every metric solves a problem on the board in a way no textbook ever taught—roundabout, indirect, using Lego blocks, but wholly correct. These are the moments when the scaffolding of echolalia, mimicry, multilingual gestalts reveals itself not as deficit but as architecture of genius.

I hold my classroom as a liminal space, a borderland where students can be in the system but not defined by it. Here, they can speak in memes, draw their maths, sing their science, echo their history. Here, communication is recognised in all its forms—not just the analytic fragments the state requires. My authority as teacher is not to enforce the system’s categories but to bear witness, to show parents and colleagues that what looks like failure is often the seed of a different kind of success.

The tragedy is not that GLPs cannot be measured—it is that the system refuses to look with eyes wide enough. These students are present, alive, brimming with communication, but they are unseen, because the measures were designed for someone else’s brain. The work of my classroom is to make them visible again—not by forcing them to conform, but by creating a space where their language, in all its non-linear brilliance, is finally heard.

Beyond Cure Thinking

Parents are rarely told the truth about time—not just hours and years, but the kind of time autistic gestalt processors actually live in. When a child does not speak on schedule, panic sets in. Chronological milestones—“first word by one,” “sentences by three,” “stories by five”—are treated as universal law, like train stations on a fixed timetable. If the train does not arrive, parents fear derailment. Into that fear march the behaviourists and charlatans, promising that with enough therapy hours, enough drills and reinforcements, the train can be forced back on schedule.

But autistic time is not a railway clock. We move in teleological time—goal-oriented, not schedule-oriented. Our sense of time is bound up in purpose, in what Glasser called the Quality World Picture: the inner vision of what we want, what feels right, what completes the pattern. Chronological time is not irrelevant—we live in the same hours as everyone else—but it is never the governing variable. What drives us forward is the alignment of conditions, the readiness of meaning, the pull of telos. When the moment is right, language arrives—not because a milestone demands it, but because the scaffolding within has ripened.

This doesn’t mean we are patient saints. People often say that of autistic GLPs—that we can wait forever, that we endure delay with serene tolerance. The truth is we can be as impatient as anyone, sometimes more so. We feel the pressure of our inner timelines, the burning need to reach what we see in our Quality World Picture. If words do not yet come, if systems block us, if the world refuses to recognise our readiness, the frustration is immense.

Think of the stereotype: the white autistic boy lining up his toy cars. Outsiders dismiss it as pointless repetition, but for him it is the building of order, the visible path toward a goal. Now imagine the bully who walks over and kicks the cars across the room. To the observer, the child’s ensuing meltdown looks like a tantrum, a storm of disproportionate emotion. But inside, something very different is happening. The carefully structured line was not just an arrangement of toys—it was the teleological arc itself, the path toward completion. When it is shattered, the brain races, trying to calculate new probabilities, new courses of action that might restore the path. None are clear. The order is broken, the goal suspended, and the system overheats under the strain of impossible computation.

That eruption is not a tantrum—it is the visible trace of a mind whose purpose has been violently interrupted, whose drive toward completion cannot simply be switched off. Our impatience is not the opposite of serenity; it is the heat of teleological drive, straining against a world that measures only by clocks and charts, blind to the inner architectures we are always trying to build.

Communication, then, is not a stopwatch to be beaten but a fruit tree unfolding in its own season. One sapling blossoms almost at once, another takes years before its first bud, another never fruits at all but grows into shade, fragrance, or bloom. Each tree leans toward its own telos, its inner pull toward completion. No gardener rips a tree from the soil in fury because it did not bear fruit “on time.” And yet autistic children are treated this way every day—forced, drilled, uprooted from their natural rhythms—because their flowering does not match the charts pinned to clinic walls.

My own research confirms how false these charts are. Autistic adults are most likely to thrive in higher education not in adolescence or young adulthood, but between the ages of 45 and 64. If the critical period myth held any weight, such success would be impossible. What this reveals is that our milestones are not missing—they are simply arranged on different structures of time. When we are given space to follow teleology instead of chronology, we flourish—even decades “late” by neurotypical measure.

To honour autistic GLP time is to trust in telos, to see flow states not as pathology but as the river of attention moving exactly where it must. It is to understand impatience not as failure but as a compass needle, pointing us toward the Quality World Picture we are straining toward. It is to resist the false urgency of cure thinking, the tyranny of timetables and milestones, and instead to create conditions where purpose can ripen in its own rhythm.

The fruit will come when it is ready—or blossom will come, or shade, or fragrance. Chronological time may call these late or useless, but within teleological time they are exactly what they were always meant to be. And when they arrive, they belong not to the stopwatch or the therapy plan—they belong to us.

Final thoughts …

Communication, in the end, is less about milestones than about meeting. Living with autistic students—and living as one myself—I often think of it as sharing a house with a roommate from another culture. At first nothing makes sense: gestures misread, silences mistaken for absence, words delivered in scripts that don’t match the situation. Rules clash, misunderstandings multiply. And yet, over time, you begin to learn one another’s ways. You borrow a phrase, adapt a gesture, discover that what looked like stubbornness was actually care expressed in another grammar. You do not erase difference; you learn to dwell alongside it, to build a shared culture of signs and meanings that is neither entirely theirs nor entirely yours.

This is how autistic communication flourishes—through patience, persistence, and mutual recognition. It does not arrive on the stopwatch, nor does it follow the charts. It grows in the spaces where people are willing to listen differently. That is why so many of us thrive online, in the written word, on platforms where time stretches and compresses to our rhythm. On social media, we can type, revise, echo, edit, until the words fit. We can speak in images, in memes, in layered callbacks that make sense only if you recognise the gestalt beneath. There, we are not late talkers—we are fluent in our own temporalities.

The roommate metaphor extends further: we each learn something of the other’s culture. Non-autistic friends discover that echolalia is not nonsense but poetry in rehearsal. Autistic friends discover that some fragments are necessary scaffolding, ways of being legible in the broader world. Together, we cobble a shared language, not perfect, but alive.

I do not see this as failure. I see it as promise. The promise that if systems can learn to listen beyond the stopwatch, if classrooms can make room for non-linear voices, if families can resist the panic of delay and trust in different kinds of time, then communication will come. It may not look like what you expected, it may not arrive when the chart predicted, but it will be real, vivid, ours.

This is what hope looks like for me: not the fantasy of cure, but the reality of solidarity—of autistic and non-autistic people learning to live together in language, each shaping and reshaping the other, until what emerges is not uniformity but a chorus.

—September 2025 Update—

When I first wrote the earliest draft of this piece, back in 2021–2022, I sent it to journals. Over and over the response was the same: not rigorous, not empirical, too much memoir, not sufficiently grounded in data. The subtext was clear—autistic lived experience is not evidence. Unless it can be reduced to charts, samples, regression tables, it does not count. So the work never “landed” in peer-reviewed spaces. It landed here, on The AutSide. Some would say that makes it less serious, less reliable. I would argue the opposite. Here it is truer, because it is unflattened. It speaks in the voice it needed to, not in the voice demanded by gatekeepers.

Part of the resistance, I think, comes from expectation. Research is imagined as something done by outsiders—grant-funded ‘experts’ who study a population, extract the data, publish their findings, and then move on. What unsettles the academy is when the so-called subject speaks back as author. When the one under the microscope writes from inside the lens, with insider knowledge and lived stakes, the whole apparatus trembles. To the journals, that looks like contamination of objectivity. To me, it looks like truth.

And yet, even in being rejected, it seeded. The thinking that took shape in those years became the backbone of three books: No Place for Autism? (2023), which framed autism within the politics of space and belonging; Holistic Language Instruction (2024), my attempt to craft a literacy curriculum that honours both analytic and gestalt processors; and Decolonising Language Education (2025), which pushes further, insisting that language pedagogy cannot be disentangled from the legacies of empire, exclusion, and erasure. This essay’s DNA runs through all of them. What journals dismissed as “memoir” became architecture for a counter-canon.

My thinking has also sharpened. Where once I hesitated, now I state it plainly: gestalt language processors are not a curious minority within autism—we are the majority. To centre analytic paths as “normal” and treat gestalt as deviation is to invert the truth. Reframing the proportions changes everything: how classrooms are designed, how assessments are structured, how interventions are judged. It places gestalt communication not at the margins, but at the heart of human variability.

There is another layer here too, one I could not have written then. Retrocausality—my own concept of how gestalts rewrite themselves—means that past experiences are not fixed. They are reinterpreted in light of present truth. Take the Sadie Hawkins dance. When I first told the story, I cast it as comic confusion, a teenage failure to read romantic cues. More than a year into my life as a trans femme, I can see it differently. My K–12 interior space was never romance-oriented in the heteronormative sense. I did not interpret the invitation as courtship at all. To me it was friendship, bestie-logic: someone wanted to hang out, and dancing was joy. My neuroqueer femme interior, alive even then, could not translate the invitation as exclusive possession. What looked like blunder to others was fidelity to my own orientation—a refusal, however unconscious, to collapse friendship into romance.

This is why retrocausality matters. We do not only remember; we rewrite. Each gestalt reshapes as new understanding enters. What seemed failure becomes coherence; what seemed naïveté becomes truth spoken in another key. My archive of experience is not static—it is living, recursive, endlessly capable of revealing new meanings.

It is also why I store these long-form gestalts here, on Substack. They are not disposable posts; they are constellations I can return to, lift back into the light, and update as new contexts call them forward. Just recently I was invited to “speak” at a Speech Therapy conference. When I looked at the questions the host wanted to address, I realised I had already written and recorded so much in response—whole essays scattered through this archive. To prepare, I found myself returning to this essay from 2022, seeing in it both the voice I had then and the voice I carry now.

So if this feels like both memoir and theory, that is exactly what it is meant to be. The journals wanted data, but what I have is story, and story is data with a soul. Here, in this space, I can write in full voice—analytical, lyrical, systemic, embodied. Here I can revisit old gestalts and offer them anew, updated not by erasure but by layering. And here I can invite you to join the ongoing conversation: to read, to respond, to bring your own gestalts into dialogue with mine. Because the story of language is not finished. It is always being rewritten—each time we echo, each time we listen differently, each time we dare to say that our presence was never absence at all.