When Silence Isn’t Absence: Notes on Autistic Embodied Language

Non-Vocal ≠ Non-Verbal: The Epistemic Injustice of Misreading Silence

Even in silence, I speak — in pacing, rhythm, waiting. This reflection weaves autistic embodiment, GLP language, and mature neurodivergent love into a quiet grammar of kinship, wonder, and refusal to be decoded.

Opening Scene — The Gentle Conversation

It’s summer. School’s out. I’m home — doing what it is I do when school isn’t in session. Which, to most people, remains something of a mystery.

The days are quieter now. The outside world busies itself — errands, shops, deliveries, the sights in town. My wife returns from her day out, keys jangling softly as she steps inside.

She glances around. The house is calm, still. I am exactly where she left me: in my chair, water bottle half-empty beside me, gaze soft, fingertips gently tracing a familiar loop along the seam of my blanket.

“You didn’t say much today,” she observes, not unkindly.

I smile. She’s not wrong. My mouth has been quiet. But not my hands. Not my breath. Not my pulse.

Silence isn’t absence. Silence is composition.

Part 1 — What “Nothing” Looks Like From the Outside

From the outside, it looks like nothing much has happened.

No errands run. No groceries brought in. No laundry folded. No appointments kept. No emails sent. No calls made. No grand project launched.

The day leaves no traceable footprint — no output for the ledger, no deliverable to point toward.

It reads, to most, as empty. Silent. Unproductive.

A day unspent.

But these are measurements designed for other kinds of days, for other kinds of minds. For people who know how to weigh their hours in meetings, tasks, and conversations. For people who expect noise as proof of life.

My days do not always lend themselves to such inventory.

Part 2 — What “Nothing” Feels Like From the Inside

Inside, though — inside, it is not nothing.

There is rhythm.

There is the quiet pacing of my body, moving gently along the perimeter of the room. The familiar creak of the floorboards underfoot, each step marking time like the slow turn of a metronome.

There is the small back-and-forth rocking when I pause — a kind of anchoring, swaying slightly on my heels, letting my vestibular system hum itself into alignment.

There is my left pointing finger, tracing again and again the outline of my left thumbnail — an old, well-worn gesture, echolalic in its own way, tactile instead of verbal.

My eyes move in looping circuits: window, lamp, kettle, floor, window again. Mapping space. Orienting. Attuning.

A soft hum travels up through my chest — not quite audible, perhaps only perceptible to my own bones. Resonance, not melody.

In the background, the refrigerator clicks into its steady pulse. The wind roars mightily at the trees outside. I synchronise with them — companions in quiet tempo.

This is not absence. This is composition.

Words are not missing. They are simply not yet shaped.

The language is here. It just isn’t vocal.

Part 3 — The GLP Freeze: When Scripts Aren’t Ready

For many autistic gestalt language processors, verbal language draws upon stored scripts — full-bodied, rehearsed gestalts of meaning that arrive as wholes. Not bits and pieces to be assembled on the fly, but pre-formed constellations we retrieve when the moment fits.

But sometimes, no script fits.

And so, we pause.

If the world is patient — if it allows that pause to hold gently — something might emerge. But often, it is not patient. It presses. It expects. It demands engagement now.

In those moments, we reach for what’s available. For me and my wife, we have an old standby — a mutually agreed-upon script, familiar and safe. We can call on it like an inside joke, a shared rhythm that allows the ‘conversation’ to continue without derailment. It buys me time. It protects the moment.

But not all situations are so kind.

Sometimes, the force of another’s energy — the urgency, the greedy demand for immediate engagement — strikes like a sudden storm. And in an instant — Ein Augenblick — the scripts vanish. The system freezes.

This is not a chosen silence. It is a freeze state born of absence. The words simply aren’t there. Not safe, not reliable. The machinery of language holds its breath.

In those moments, my body becomes the language.

The pacing, the rocking, the thumbnail tracing, the looping eye movements — they are not nervous tics. They are a form of waiting-language. A way of regulating the absence. A way of holding myself steady whilst my system searches for safe ground.

Part 4 — Non-Vocal ≠ Non-Verbal

Let me set something straight — from the inside, because the research is still circling this without much clarity.

For years, people like me — autistic gestalt language processors — were labelled non-verbal. That was the term: non-verbal autism. But I was never non-verbal. I had language. Just not always accessible language. Not always accessible vocal language.

Now, my paperwork says ASD, Level 2 — significant support needs with functional language. Which is technically more accurate, but still woefully incomplete.

Here’s the real distinction:

• Non-vocal: my mouth may be silent. No speech is produced.

• Non-verbal: no language or meaning is exchanged.

The problem is: the world continues to confuse these. And that confusion does harm.

Because meaning persists. Even when my mouth is still, my body speaks. My breath, my pacing, my synchrony with the hum of the room — they carry intention, feeling, presence. The conversation hasn’t stopped. It has simply shifted channels.

But much of the literature — especially the ABA-produced literature — refuses to see this. They frame our silence as defiance. As stubbornness. As manipulation. As a behaviour to be extinguished. They write entire intervention models built on the premise that we are faking this freeze state. That we simply need to be pushed, broken, trained out of it.

They do not read us.

We read them.

That is the double empathy problem in brutal relief. They publish studies claiming natural language acquisition (NLA) isn’t real, that GLP isn’t a legitimate framework, that echolalia has no communicative value. They write protocols to “correct” us. They measure compliance, not comprehension.

And yet here we are — reading their papers, mapping their discourse, building our own language from the fragments they dismiss.

Non-vocal is not non-verbal. The absence of speech is not the absence of communication. And this body — pacing, tracing, looping — is still speaking, whether or not they have the instruments to hear it.

Part 5 — Embodied Gestalt Language

I have spent years trying to track this through the literature.

I have my PhD credentials, my university library logins, my carefully crafted search prompts, my AI-enabled filters, my citation managers. I know how to dig.

And still: the literature is all over the place.

There are glimpses — research on co-regulation through rhythm and pacing, on joint action and synchrony as pre-verbal communication, on gesture and movement as extended forms of language. Studies that capture pieces of what I live.

But much of this work remains fragmented. Disjointed. Often filtered through clinical frameworks that treat these phenomena as deficits to be explained, rather than as languages to be understood.

The voices from lived experience — from people like me — are largely discounted. Categorised as anecdotal, non-generalisable, unscientific. And so the official research circles itself endlessly, studying autistic embodiment without quite recognising that it is studying autistic language.

Academia doesn’t know what it’s looking at.

And here I am. Sitting quietly in my chair, tracing the outline of my thumbnail. Writing poetry about it. As a stim. As a kind of self-soothing. As a small act of resistance against the sting of invisibility.

Because this is my language.

I speak in pacing.
I speak in timing.
I speak in the rhythm of waiting.

“On Saying Nothing, But Not Being Silent”

“You didn’t say much today,” she observes.
I smile. My mouth was quiet, yes. But not my hands. Not my breath. Not my pulse.

Silence isn’t absence. Silence is composition.
My scripts weren’t ready. So I paced the edges of the room, running my fingertips along the wall’s familiar seam — a kind of echolalic tracing, but for touch.
I hummed very softly, though perhaps only my bones heard it. My eyes flickered in small loops: window, lamp, kettle, floor, window again.

I was waiting for words to arrive.
Sometimes they don’t.
And so my body speaks instead — in pacing, in swaying, in synchronising with the steady metronome of the refrigerator’s hum.
It’s a language I learned long before speech.

You see no words. I feel no scripts.
But still, I am saying:
I am here. I am holding myself together. I am trying not to tip into overwhelm. I am speaking, in the grammar of waiting.
Some days that is all the language I have.

And she smiles, because she knows this too:
I am not non-verbal.
I am simply non-vocal.
There is a difference.

Part 6 — The Return to Our Quiet Conversation

What happens between us in these moments is something I often try to explain, because it’s not always visible to those outside.

I am waiting for words to arrive.
Sometimes they don’t…

What she sees is not emptiness. Not avoidance. She sees what many would overlook: the holding together. The managing. The balancing act of not tipping over into overwhelm whilst my system searches for safe, usable language.

And what makes all the difference is this: she knows that.

She has known it from the start. Long before we had the formal language — gestalt processing, selective mutism, embodiment — she intuitively recognised the rhythms of my waiting-language. She saw the meaning in my tracing, my pacing, my looping gaze. She read the tension behind the pause, not as resistance, but as care. As regulation. As my way of staying present.

That is what mature autistic love can look like. A partner who doesn’t demand that words appear on schedule. A partner who hears the message beneath the silence. A partner who trusts that communication is happening, even when the language looks different.

It’s why I share pieces like this — with her blessing — to model what this kind of partnership can be. Not perfect, but attuned. Not free from misunderstanding, but willing to navigate the unsaid with grace.

When she glances over and smiles in these quiet moments, it’s not because she’s waiting for me to speak. It’s because she already hears me.

I am not silent.
I am simply non-vocal.
There is a difference.

Closing Echo

I think often of the old stories. The ones in my grandmother’s books. The ones in mine. The stories of the fae.

In those stories, when humans and the fae met, communication was possible — but only sometimes. Only when both sides slowed down. Only when humans were willing to attend not just to words, but to gesture, to rhythm, to timing, to presence. To attunement. The fae did not need decoding. They were not puzzles to be solved. They simply spoke differently.

We once knew this. Humans once allowed for mystery. For whimsy. For wonder. But somewhere along the way, we told ourselves that growing up meant leaving wonder behind — replacing it with measurement, precision, categories, and control.

They mistranslated the old line — “when I became a man, I put away childish things” — as though what was being set aside was curiosity, delight, whimsy, and wonder. As though maturity required sterility. As though seriousness demanded the absence of joy.

But that was never what the text meant. And yet, the culture absorbed it this way — Protestant industry wedded to colonial certainty. To grow up, they said, was to stop dancing with the unknown. To stop listening for the songs in the trees. To stop believing that not all language comes wrapped in words.

And so they built machines to “decode” us.
Just as they once tried to capture the language of the Highlands.
Just as Robert Kirk once sought to pin Gaelic to the page, stripping it of breath and nuance.
Just as the outsider in my story watched the fae from the edge of the woods, unable to hear the music beneath the melody.

What the outsider could not grasp was that these moments of encounter are rare and fragile — not because the fae are unintelligible, but because true understanding requires stepping outside of one’s own frame.

I write these small essays — with my wife’s blessing — to model something different. To hold open the space where wonder still breathes. To show that autistic love, autistic language, autistic being is not something broken to be decoded, but something relational to be joined.

I am not non-verbal.
I am simply non-vocal.
And though constellations don’t really fit into straight lines, I still scatter my words — just in case you pass this way.