Everyone has an opinion. Not everyone has a voice.
Everyone has a different way of expressing themselves.
#payitforward
Imagine if you had laryngitis on the day of your big presentation to some investors in your company, Positive Insight. How do you get your point across without using words?
Your arms and legs are also broken, your face is paralysed: How do you communicate?
Ok, no investors today, let's get a little more basic. How do you tell your wife you are hungry? How do you tell her you need to pee?
Certainly your wife would need to adjust how she interacts with you.
This is a realistic scenario for millions of people, the inability to talk using their mouths. Many of these non-verbal people are also paraplegic or quadriplegic. They often possess limited mental capacity due to autism, down syndrome, or some other disability.
And yet, like all of us, they have opinions. They have personality. They have desires, passions. Things make them excited or sad. They get hungry or lonely, just like everyone.
I work with an individual in a Day Program environment; I will call him Bert. He is in a wheelchair and has limited use of his arms. He is non-verbal and never complains, even if a less caring person left him in a dark room alone all day, sitting in soiled pants.
An expressionless face does not mean no feelings.
I knew something, though: Just because he can't complain does not mean he has no opinion, or doesn't get sad. But I needed to discover, What inspires him?
Not knowing what else to do, I always talked to him, included him in conversations as much as possible. I would touch his arm to let him know I cared; he would often pull away with a gasp and a grimace.
Then one day, someone turned the radio from Top 40 to Oldies. Surfer music from the sixties played, and Bert's face lit up like sunshine. His mouth opened into a smile as big as his face, he lifted both arms stiffly, and laughed in his Bert way. It was magic.
OK, so Bert likes Oldies music.
I also discovered he won't eat Jello or canned fruit. To say "no" to a certain food, he closes his mouth tight and turns his face away.... and effective way of saying, I've had enough!
Bert does like snack cakes and chocolate milk. He will eat better if certain people feed him. His desires may be simple, but if we know how to listen and observe, they are obvious.
Let us remember the most famous non-verbal quadriplegic: Stephen Hawking, whose ideas have shaped the way we see the Universe. What else lurks in the minds of silent people?