My first word was fish.
I said it while hanging on to the crib railing and pointing to the swimming little fish in my room I shared with my other two brothers.
My adopted brother has me beat in that regard, however, as his first word was elephant. Dang!
My parents told me that I learned to talk before I could walk.
And, they don’t mean like, a smattering of toddler vocabulary, they mean full fledged multiword utterances, even phrases or sentences, fairly quickly and early.
What the hell did I talk about?
They said I talked about everything I could, everything under the sun, everything around me, everything that was happening… apparently I talked about figuring out how to walk, which is funny to think about.
So, you’d think that I’d be very dependent on language, and yet, I’m not. I don’t “think in” language per se. I don’t have an “inner dialogue,” in the sense of a constant running monologue narrating my life.
It sounds exhausting, to be honest. I can “hear” a voice, or a sound, in my head when I *want* to. It’s difficult to “turn it off” when reading, but it’s possible. I usually don’t, which is probably why my reading speed has a ceiling. On that front, tests confirmed I had Junior undergraduate level (grade “15”) language comprehension skills in 4th grade.
This isn’t equivalent to Junior-level vocabulary, or composition. This is a measure of comprehension and reasoning over linguistic information.
I don’t think in words. Words are just a passing impression in my mind, like an image, a memory, or a sound.
I think in processes.
When I’m not super emotional I remember interesting conversations with almost near-minute precision (including time, place, and topic) for years and years. I can remember the surrounding circumstances behind a particular memory. I will ask people what was happening around a certain time, and upon remembering that, I recall the conversation we had, or the highly specific thing we did.
I can remember my thought processes behind things for a really long time, conjuring them back up at will to explain pretty much any decision.
In the words of a skilled psychiatrist, and also the most helpful, I am a psychoanalysts “dream patient.”
The key, surprisingly, is a sort of ephemeral “physicality” even though I’m not athletic at all. My gross motor skills are horrible, but my fine motor skills are quite exceptional, hence why my typing is so extraordinarily fast.
And that’s the key right there: typing. I can sit down and draw you a QWERTY keyboard from memory. That’s not necessarily special in itself. However, when I was about 6 or 7 (first grade) I taught myself how to operate and program my family’s TRS-80 Color Computer II 16k in the cold, uninsulated “storage room” hooked up to my great-grandmother’s old giant-knobbed television.
That ended up unlocking so much by accident.
I learned to spell by typing it out in my head. That’s still how I spell anything (so, ideographic languages like Japanese are a bit of a challenge there). My brain can immediately conjure up the layout and sequence of keys for any given word.
Which is impressive, I suppose, maybe, but that’s just the beginning.
That means every word has a ‘diagram,’ a placement, a muscle memory to a degree alongside every other thing a word is. That’s the physicality I’m talking about. To me everything is in a ‘space’ that isn’t a space. It’s why, by a sort of mental “muscle memory” I can shit out counterarguments or logical conclusions like an LLM (except… faster actually) on the spot.
People roll their eyes, perhaps, but in person, directly, I’m apparently extraordinary in my adaptative refutations of any argument as it occurs. Other people besides my partner and mother have seen it, and, more importantly, delighted in it.
When I argue in person, in my brain, it has the same textual physicality as if I’m debating on a screen or “Internet arguing,” which I see as simply writing micro-essaying. Others aren’t often as enthusiastic about this view.
In my head, if I’m not being emotionally aroused, I can scroll and recall both words and concepts like it was text on a screen.
I don’t sit around pondering for days to come up with distilled refutations for every day arguments that hopefully will work, and I don’t spend “days” typing them out just so.
It doesn’t take that long.
I didn’t realize people didn’t know this until my friend told me to stop spending so much time writing stuff that “didn’t matter,” until he realized that I only spent, like, 3 hours on it as opposed to the 3 days he knew he’d spend on it. Also, the “didn’t matter” part is a bit why we’re not friends anymore, so… that worked out well, since, I’m still doing it.
Language is like water to me. It’s like breathing air.
I know others are not like this, and I have patience and respect, but only up to a point. When it becomes clear that I am not being extended the same, then, I cease giving it. When it’s obvious that my abilities and intelligence are only to be mocked, then, we’re not friends anymore.
End of story.
This is just me talking about me. I’m not building myself up to be something I’m not. These are the facts. These don’t make me special, as I don’t “need to be special.” This is who I am.
It is possible that… I may just be special.
It’s gotta happen somewhere.