How Can I Talk If My Lips Don't Move?

How Can I Talk If My Lips Don't Move is a book written by an autistic young adult, who was 19 years old at the time he wrote it. He was non-verbal for much of his childhood and still continues to struggle with verbal language, and yet he is very expressive in his writing. The book is a fascinating look inside the mind of the author, Tito Rajarshi, especially as a young child. He was born and spent his early years in India, then later moved to the U.S., first to California and then to Texas. He describes with vivid detail scenes from as early as three years old and what was going through his mind and with his senses. He describes why he was obsessed with the mirror on the second floor of one of the homes he grew up in and ceiling fans and switches in the other.

One theme throughout the book is the patience, perseverance and belief in her son that Tito's mother had throughout his childhood. She taught him all kinds of things that so many people would have thought were beyond his capability to learn. Sometimes it took a long time to learn a new skill, and sometimes it needed to be broken into very small steps, but she never seemed to doubt, at least in her son's eyes, his ability to learn. Even when he was very young and unable to communicate much to her, she continued to teach him, confident that he was taking it in.

He first learned to communicate using words when he learned to spell and write when he was five and six. First he used a letter board and pointed to each letter, and then soon after, he learned to write on his own. Now he is an author and has given the world a very unique look at non-verbal and very limited-verbal autism. This is his description of some of the things that caused him anxiety as a very young child:

"One experience diffused into the next. And every experience settled in my mind as an example of a natural phenomenon, which laid down the rules of the world. For instance, if I saw a bird on a tree, and, at that very moment, I saw someone walking across the street in front of our gate, I concluded that every time a bird sits on a tree, someone needs to walk across the street, What if they did not happen together? Well, I would panic and get so anxious I would scream."

"I remember my voice screaming when I could not see my shadow anywhere around me. I wondered whether it had left me here all alone. I was afraid that I would loose my existence because my shadow had left me. I thought and believed that my shadow was an extension of my body. The feeling of loosing my shadow was like losing a part of my body."

About his senses when he was very young:

"My hearing would become increasingly powerful whenever that happened (hearing real sounds) and I stopped seeing anything. I could focus all my concentration on only one sense, and that is hearing. I am not sure whether or not I had to put any kind of effort toward hearing because I was too young and uninformed in science to analyze the sensory battle that was taking place within my nervous system. It just meant that my colors would disappear if there were sounds vibrating around me."

"Mother knew nothing of my selective vision when I was three. I could look at certain things but not at others. Things that calmed my senses were easier to see, while things that stressed my vision were not easy to look at. So perhaps I could not see things as people expected me to see."

Something Tito overheard her mother say to his father:

"What is the use of going to someone's house when I cannot carry on a conversation because I am constantly trying to keep Tito from playing with the switches?"

His difficulty with his senses, becoming obsessed with things and overgeneralizing situations (like the bird on the tree and the person walking by) routinely caused him crippling anxiety and would lead to screaming and tantrums frequently during the early years. To me it was fascinating to hear what caused anxiety and that most of his tantrums and screaming at a young age were a result of feeling very anxious. On a broader level, it applies to all children. Their tantrums may seem ridiculous and illogical to us, but to them there is something going on, either actual or perceived that is causing them very real distress. A lot of the extreme anxiety calmed as Tito got older and learned how the world worked a little better. He still gets stressed and anxious in certain situations, but overall, things are much better for him. I could go on and on. It was a book full of insights and well worth the read, although it is hard to find. I had to order it on Amazon.