he was mute for 9 years

i do have this distinct memory of being in preschool you know i was the kid that didn't talk and everyone knew it we were out on the playground and there was this other kid that recess just for whatever reason just a little kid i was just copying everything he was doing so like he was on tricycle so i got on track school doing everything the exact same thing even trying to match up like my foot pedals with his foot pedals and then he just started going like ah and i remember like also doing that like i also went like and then everyone stopped and he like turned around and he's like dude ben just talked and i remember thinking like oh [ __ ] what have i done i don't know why i thought that because like it's not like i was trying to be mute but i remember thinking like i've i've almost like a broken character right like this was some sin that i've done and you know right after that i just went back to being mute that's sort of when i realized oh yeah this is kind of weird isn't it like it's not just that i'm a kid who doesn't talk but like i have this deep identity issue it seems like i want to talk because i just did it like i have the capability and and that's it right there but i can't so i think that's probably the first time i realized something's probably up probably probably not that normal the thing i'm what they call selectively mute or it was selectively mute or situationally mute which is you know there was no physical deformity preventing me from talking you know when i was a baby toddler age my parents got divorced you know pretty common thing to happen but for some reason my brain took it in a pretty bad way you don't really choose to do anything at that age it's just like your brain does it for you and i think sort of through maybe natural selection over the generations some gene i have made me kind of freak out when my parents got divorced and start punishing the world for it to to maybe try to fix that situation i was selectively mute which means i talked to almost no one i would talk to my mom and my brother and sister and you know sometimes my dad a lot of people kind of hear that and they think like oh okay so you were just shy you weren't mute but it's actually really it's a really different thing i still interact with people like i would still have conversations quote unquote i just couldn't speak it was like something in my brain preventing me from having the words come out of my throat so i would have like creative ways of interacting with people like nodding and pointing and stuff like that but i still had friends a little interesting like bias that gets applied to your friends because it's kind of hard to be with friends with someone that doesn't talk so it kind of attracts a certain type of person i attracted this sort of person who likes to hear themselves talk and can carry on a conversation without the other person participating which i think sort of like everyone knows a person like that that's just like how my friends were and that kind of poisoned me even a little harder towards talking because i would sit there and listen to this person talk to themselves and like not even consider what was going on in my head you know knowing that they can't really get that out of me but still want to hear their own voice they want to get stuff in their brain out into the sky and then forget about it i sort of was only exposed to those sorts of people through that i started kind of hating talking and conversation even more because it seems so pointless like all you do is you just say the thing that your body is urging you to say and then you forget about it it took me until my i would say mid to late 20s to figure out that friends i was making were not normal people and that conversation can be real and true and good and can grow the brains of both people participating but you know once in a while you still get that person who just won't stop talking they just want to hear their own voice it's like hard to make up ways to to make up for for speaking and i didn't really use writing very much maybe once in a while just as a tool in the tool bag one really interesting thing is i was actually a decent student you know you're a kid a teacher asked a question like what's eight times zero and you know the answer right and you want to say it so you raise your hand and then the teacher calls on you and then you you know what do you do like you can't just say it you can't even talk to your grandmother let alone like talk in a class full of 30 kids i eventually developed this thing i think maybe with the help of my parents and meeting the teacher beforehand where i would like be okay with talking to the teacher so i would raise my hand i would get called on and i would get up out of my chair walk up to the teacher and like whisper it in her ear so that no one else could hear it and then the teacher would repeat it and i'd just go back sit down i'm sure that every single one of those kids thought i was just like so what the hell what the [ __ ] what what is this like especially kids who didn't know me yet when the point was reached when i had like a friend with me during recess and stuff like that maybe someone who doesn't know me would come up and ask me a question and my friend would be there to say like he doesn't talk i was going back and forth between my mom's house and my dad's house they luckily lived in the same town luckily and unluckily like it was great that i was able to spend time with both of them and not just forget about one for the rest of my life i still know the days because i was so ingrained in my daily life sunday moms monday i'd go to school from moms go home to dads tuesday i'd go to school from dads go home to moms wednesday moms thursday pool dads friday dads saturday dads and then at the end of saturday at 6 pm my dad would bring me to my mom's it's kind of weird like all of these days of the week just like built up these internal meanings to me i'll be completely honest i did not like being in my dad's house um for probably a lot of complicated reasons days when i went to my dad's or spent them at my dad's built up this like negative energy for me that i still sort of i still have the echo of that today like i still kind of feel weird about saturday evenings 6 p.m because like that's the day i would finally get to go back to my mom's house after like the longest duration of the week being in a place that i didn't enjoy being my mom thought that i was gonna grow up to be a mentally disabled person um with a lot of cases of this of selective mutism there's sort of this like misdiagnosis of being on the autistic spectrum which may or may not be the case for me but um it's sort of you know you don't talk to really anyone when they talk back talk to you there are differences of course and there are ways to diagnose them separately but i i think partially because of that and partially because of a lot of other reasons my mom thought that i would just never speak like you know you have a kid who's nine years old who doesn't really speak you don't really have any reason to believe that they're going to start one day uh and so she she thought that i would just be dependent on the system not ever be happy she was pretty concerned i didn't realize until later until we talked about it maybe four or five years ago that she was really really concerned i was the third of her kids so she knew what a normal kid looked like and she knew it wasn't this uh she kind of like blamed herself um which totally was not what she should have done but i can totally understand also being in that situation you know when it's all said and done i think i really even though i i sort of accept that i didn't really have any say in the matter i really regret like putting her through everything that i put through put her through my dad's the sort of person who won't accept that there are problems without people who caused those problems a lot of my behaviors spending a lot of time on the computer spending a lot of time playing games or like messing around with learning to like do interesting things on the computer like coding my dad saw those things as causes of all the problems in my life my mom would see me spending a lot of time on computer in the same way and like you know my dad if he saw me on the computer when he you know he leaves the house to go to home depot or whatever and i'm on the computer and then he comes back and i'm still on the computer or i'm on a computer again like in his head it's like this is the problem this is like why you're such a weird kid because you're just spending all your time on the computer and he'd have me you know stop spending time on the computer come spend time with the family which was in the same room but just on the couch watching television so it's almost like the argument in my head like you understand that this is less interactive but i was just a kid i didn't know how to get it out at my mom's house i would do the same things i'd spend a lot of time on the family computer messing around on the other side of the coin like she bought me a book on making your own website for kids and it was the most amazing thing that i ever got it like completely kicked off the rest of my life as you know now i'm a 29 year old software engineer it's amazing what that book did for me and i just feel like that's a total and complete sum of like the differences between how my my dad viewed my condition and my mom viewed it you know there's this weird thing with the phone like i'm not shy enough to not want to answer the phone like i'll answer the phone it's 1990s you got one landline for the whole family so i'll answer the phone but then i won't like what do i say like i can't say anything so i'll answer the phone and then just sit there with dead air and then eventually the other person will go like hello and if it was you know my mom or something then i think maybe i was comfortable saying one or two words overall still pretty afraid of the phone but if it was a family friend who knew about me and and my condition then they would kind of know that i was just there sitting on the other end listening and they'd see it say like you know can you get your mom for me and stuff like that i'm the youngest my brother's three years older than me my sister's three years older than he is my sister being the oldest was old enough to be aware of what was going on and why it affected me the youngest so she had almost like a motherly instinct towards me i remember being a little brat and like not wanting to put on pants in the morning before going to school i was just being really really bratty about it it was at my dad's house i remember he like spanked me for it uh which is you know not a big deal in the scheme of like ways that you could hit your kid but i just remember being really upset and crying about it and wanting to even less so put on my pants so you know me being a little kid not wanting to put on pants like you know whatever but i just felt so alone my sister sort of after my dad was finished and left the room uh sort of came in and like helped me put them on and explained to me everything and yeah so my sister sort of had this this protective fora for me my brother uh is both because he's older but also because he he likes a lot of the same things as my dad had a better relationship with him like whenever my dad would be angry at me for being into stuff i'm into like being on the computer my brother was like also into the things my dad was into like fixing cars and like driving cars and tools and stuff like that so like they got along pretty well i think my brother still sort of didn't have a great relationship with him i'm 29 and this is the first time in my life that i've ever seeked out a community of mute people and you know it turns out there's a discord server for them i actually haven't met anyone else who has who had the same thing that i had i guess i would call myself a recovered selective mute but a lot of people in the server are completely mute for psychological reasons there's people who are completely mute for for physical reasons like they actually got a chunk of their throat blown off or you know they were never able to talk from birth or something like that there's people who are considering becoming mew people who are well above child age but they say a lot of times the story is the same they say i talk a lot and my mouth gets me into a lot of trouble because of it so i would like to become mute some people even ask like is there a way for me to mutilate myself temporarily to make myself be physically mute so i can prevent myself from talking and getting into trouble and that was a little odd to me uh firstly do you really want to remove one of like it's basically the closest thing to a sense that you have without being a sense like you really want to remove your ability to communicate easily with other people can you try to solve this with therapy or something first instead of going to such an extreme option i'm all for you if you're like sound of mind take a vow of silence like that that's that's what you should do if you're in that situation like take a vow of silence don't physically mutilate yourself but also just the vast range of diversity of people in that server like people who have never said a word and they're now in their 30s and they've literally never said a word it's like really interesting to hear their stories and to hear how they get around in the world how they get around in relationships and and stuff like that the weird thing about being mute for 19 years is that everyone knows you're mute and so how do you stop like that like how do you make that character change it's almost like you have hair that's down to your ankles and then you know you want to cut it off but you don't want to freak everyone out being like they might not even recognize you right if you cut off all your hair and like become bald so you kind of have to like choose this this tactical point to just stop being mute and for me it was i think the start of third grade or maybe sort of fourth grade where like i basically decided to myself over the summer that i was ready i felt like i had spent the last couple of years being mute just because that's where people see me as you know i've been mute for so long so that's what i have to continue being but i was just kind of sick of it like this is just a character that i built up for myself and i don't want to be it anymore so let's just stop and i think it was the first day of school i just started behaving as if i was never mute like i was talking to people who i had known forever and they would be like whoa what what what what they'd like point at me and and i would just kind of you know what else can you do but but pretend like it's not a big deal what i ended up doing was just pretending like it wasn't a big deal but you know of course it was and i'm very happy i finally did it but that's that's how i that's how i stop being you how did your mom react when you made the decision did she know did you tell her oh hey mom i'm gonna be doing this in third grade i don't think i told her i i do think that it got back to her from the school somehow i think i remember that she was very happy when i came home one day and kind of you know doing the same thing that a friend would do when they hear their friend talk for the first time but with the whole motherly aspect like just you know very happy and like clapping and and all that kind of stuff i did have to go to speech therapy class because i just i didn't know that i had to use this thing right i didn't know how to say a lot of words it's actually a miracle that i could say anything at all but i i did have problems with my s's i would say a s like like a f like almost like a th and so i do remember like having to get pulled out of class a lot to go to speech therapy and learn how to say s properly i do feel like i still have some mumbling issues as well i used to be really bad at it like middle school high school i actually used to record a podcast with a friend and look looking back on it now like listening to those episodes again it's it's very embarrassing to hear how mumbly i am like how timid my voice always was and so that's something i'm always trying to to work on by being mute you attract a certain type of person and by being not mute you probably don't want to be friends with that person anymore because they're used to talking to themselves and hearing themselves talk but i wanna i wanna talk now like i wanna talk now when you've been mute for nine years or even if you are just a quiet person when you talk people listen people listen a lot when you're mute for nine years or if you just like stay quiet a lot with your friend group it's it's almost like a super power when you start a sentence everyone shuts up and looks at you and it's actually fantastic to develop that superpower and you can develop it anyone can develop it and i highly recommend that some people you know try that out with maybe a new group of friends i highly recommend some people just shut the [ __ ] up sometimes you know i was mentioning earlier that shyness and mutants are two different things but i do feel i spent another 15 or so years after that event being shy not wanting to rock the boat it's better to not say anything and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt that's one of the quotes that i lived by for a long time now i i'd say it's a clever quote but i don't know if i would live by it it's a pretty extreme thing for a long time even if i had something important to say and was not mute i would still kind of like wait for a natural pause an actual break in the sentence and my my threshold for what a natural break was was like much longer than others like i would wait until there's like almost awkward silence level of break in the conversation before bringing anything up that's one of the things that like slowly over time i'm able to bring that down i i still have a problem interrupting people when they're talking interrupting is is a bad thing like i understand that interrupting is a bad thing but sometimes interrupting is good it's good to have the ability to interrupt someone and break that rule when you need it like if they're about to tell you a really long story and you've heard it before i sometimes just like sit there and wait until there's a natural break which might be at the end of the story and then i'll say i've heard that before and that person is like now mad right because i didn't interrupt them so that's something i still kind of struggle with if you could tell everyone in the world one thing what would it be you know people talk about natural selection and evolution like it's something that happened but it's something that happens and you're not at the end of it you're in the middle of it it took me a while to like get that through my head and once i could like then i could finally understand that like i'm not normal i'm not perfect there is no normal there is no perfect we're all just like chains in this link that will keep going on forever and if you can understand that then like i think maybe that will help you to identify any issues that you have rather than assume that there are issues with the world at large and that really helped me to understand like you know it's okay to think about my mutism and it's okay to think about my social anxiety uh in fact it's okay to like research them online to see if they have had them because like who knows if you have anxiety like i i had a lot of issues with anxiety that i didn't know were issues with anxiety i thought it was just once in a while people would just be annoying all day to me and then the next day they'd be fine again and understanding that that was a me thing and not a vem thing was really really important eventually fixing the issue you

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Id: kTzN2jSfCRc

Length: 18min 23sec (1103 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020