Learning to Say What You Need
She told me she used to go completely silent. Not shy — locked. The words would be somewhere in her, and she simply couldn't reach them.
I sat across from a young woman this week during an assessment, and something she said has stayed with me since, in the way certain sentences do — not because they were dramatic, but because they were quietly, precisely true.
As a child, she said, she would withdraw the moment a situation asked something of her she couldn't name. Not tantrums, not visible distress that anyone watching would have clocked as a cry for help. Just an internal door closing. Sometimes she froze entirely, unable to produce a single word. Other times the problem was even further back than the words — she didn't know what she needed in the first place, only that something in her was straining against a demand she couldn't identify, let alone meet.
What she described next is the part I keep returning to. Somewhere between childhood and now, she learned to speak. Not through a program, not through a single breakthrough moment she could point to and hand me as the answer. Through years of small, repeated exposure — through people who stayed patient long enough for her to find a sentence, through her own slow accumulation of the courage it takes to say something true about yourself before you're certain it will be received well. She built the capacity to say "I need this" one clumsy attempt at a time, in relationship with people willing to wait for it.
She still doesn't have a diagnosis. She came to this assessment as an adult, carrying decades of having managed — quietly, alone, without a name for what she was managing. And she sat with me and described all of this with a steadiness that had clearly cost her a great deal to build, before any clinician had ever confirmed that her experience was real enough to warrant the answer she might eventually be given.
I don't know how to write about this without sounding like I'm making a point I've made before, so I'm going to try not to. I don't want this to become an argument. I want it to stay what it was in the room: a person who spent years without language for her own needs, finding that language anyway, mostly through the patience of people who didn't require her to have a diagnosis first in order to take her seriously.
She works with children now. She has built her adult life around giving others, earlier, what took her so long to find for herself.
I think about how much depended on the people who waited for her. Not fixed her, not diagnosed her into legibility, not rushed her toward a label that would make her comprehensible faster. Just waited, long enough, for her own words to arrive.
