The words I use about myself.

Because both vocal folds are missing, the part of the throat that normally protects the airway is not built the usual way.

The practical result is a weak cough, more risk when I choke, and more caution around illness than most fourteen year olds need.

Anyone caring for me should know this before they need to know it.

Doctors write aphonia in my files, and it is accurate: no phonation at all, not a quiet voice or a hoarse one.

Outside a clinic it tends to stall a conversation, so I usually swap it for born without vocal folds and keep the medical term for paperwork.

Because my throat is not built the usual way, choking is riskier and coughing is weaker.

Anyone supervising me for a day should know this and know it early.

It is not a reason to hover. It is a reason to have the information.

This is the plain description of bilateral vocal-fold agenesis. Both vocal folds, the pair of tissue folds that vibrate to make voiced sound, never developed before birth.

It is the phrasing I prefer because it cannot be misread. Nobody hears it and wonders whether I am shy, traumatised, deaf or refusing to cooperate.

It also explains the parts people forget: a weak cough, airway risk, and why speech therapy was never going to change the outcome.

The voice on my tablet was donated. A living person recorded hours of speech so that it could be built into a voice that sounds like a boy my age rather than a machine.

It is not my own voice, and I never say it is. It is a borrowed voice I am grateful for, and it belongs to the sentences I wrote.

So the honest description is a speech-generating device with a donated voice, not text to speech.

The larynx houses the vocal folds and helps guard the airway when someone swallows.

My larynx exists, but the folds inside it never formed, which is why doctors call it agenesis rather than damage.

Nothing was removed and nothing broke. It was built this way before I was born.

Most people already understand this word, and I do not correct anyone who uses it in good faith.

On its own it is incomplete. It has been used as an insult, and plenty of readers still hear it as deaf, shy or unintelligent, none of which apply.

So it works best paired with the reason: mute because I was born without vocal folds. What I refuse is 'a mute' used as a noun, or 'the mute kid' as a name.

This term was used on parts of this site before, and I asked for it to go. In most readers' heads it sits one small step from nonverbal.

Once that link is made, people start speaking slowly, simplifying vocabulary or addressing the adult beside me, which is exactly the misreading the whole site exists to prevent.

If the sentence needs an adjective, voiceless does the same job without the false implication.

Nonverbal means without language. I write poetry and articles in several languages and argue well enough to be exhausting.

The word is often used loosely to mean 'does not talk', but the two are not the same thing, and the confusion has real consequences in classrooms and clinics.

If someone means I do not produce speech, the accurate phrasing is that I have no voice.

Phonation is what happens when air passes between two vocal folds and sets them vibrating.

With bilateral vocal-fold agenesis there is nothing there to vibrate, so there is no phonation at all: no speech, no hum, no cry.

This is the difference between cannot and will not, and it is the whole difference.

Selective mutism is an anxiety disorder in which a person who is physically able to speak becomes unable to in certain situations. It is not a choice either, and it deserves respect.

It is simply not what I have. My condition is anatomical and constant: no vocal folds, no voice, in every room and every mood.

Confusing the two leads to the worst advice I receive, which is being encouraged to relax and try.

A speech therapist can help with safe eating and with how my communication system works.

No amount of therapy grows vocal folds, and being asked to try anyway got old years ago.

The good ones work on access. The unhelpful ones work on getting sound out of me.

Someone else recorded hours of speech so the tablet could sound like a person instead of a satnav.

I never had a voice to bank myself, which is what makes the gift unusual.

It is a donated voice, not a copy of anyone I am pretending to be.

When a sentence needs one adjective rather than a clause, this is the one I choose. It is literally accurate: no vocal folds means no voice.

It also keeps the emphasis where it belongs. I have plenty of language. What I lack is sound.

Use it as an adjective. I am a voiceless writer, not 'a voiceless'.

People often assume a voiceless boy can at least whisper, because a whisper already sounds like almost nothing.

A whisper is still shaped air moving past the folds. Without them there is no whisper either.

The honest sentence is that my throat makes no words at all, quiet or loud.

AAC covers every method I use instead of speech: a speech-generating tablet, typing on a phone or laptop, handwriting, gestures, family signs and some Polish Sign Language.

The tablet voice was recorded and donated by a boy who later became my friend. When it speaks, that is me speaking. Talking over it is talking over me.

AAC is not a training tool or a temporary step towards speech. It is the communication.

In access language, the partner is the hearing, speaking person in the conversation.

The point of the phrase is that access is not one person's problem. Half of it is whether the other person waits, reads and answers what was actually written.

It is the most fixable half.

People pair silence with deafness constantly. I hear everything said in the room, including the part where someone asks my mother whether I understand.

Because my hearing is fine, raising your voice does nothing except make the room louder for an autistic teenager who already finds noise expensive.

A trained interpreter renders what a person says. That is a real job and I respect it.

What I am not asking for is a relative who summarises me, corrects me, or answers on my behalf while I am still typing.

If I brought a person, talk to me and let that person do their job.

People sometimes over-mouth words at me. I hear perfectly well, so it only makes them harder to follow.

Lip reading would be relevant if I were deaf. I am not.

Speak normally, then wait for typing.

Polish, English, German, Dutch, Spanish and French all live in my head and come out through a keyboard.

People assume no voice means less language. The paperwork says the opposite.

I would rather be asked which languages I write than told how surprising it is.

Batteries die, apps freeze and shops are loud. A notebook works everywhere.

Most of my poems start on paper before they reach a screen.

Handing me a pen is a perfectly good way of saying hello.

I sign with the people who sign back, mostly family and a few friends, and type or write with everyone else.

Sign language is a full language with its own grammar. Saying I speak with my hands is well meant but blurs what is actually happening.

I type a sentence and the device says it, so people who cannot read over my shoulder still get the words.

I do not call it text to speech. Text to speech makes people picture the flat robotic voice from a satnav, and that is not what comes out of my tablet.

The correct words are speech-generating device, or simply my tablet, or my talker.

A sentence takes longer to type than to say. That gap is where most conversations go wrong, because people fill it.

Finishing my sentence for me is the single most common mistake, and it usually produces the wrong sentence.

The fix is small: ask, then wait, then read the whole thing before replying.

I am fine with autistic, with autist, and with saying I have autism. I do not correct people over which of those they pick, as long as it is said plainly.

What I do mind is autism being treated as my whole identity. It explains sensory load, transitions and my need for clear plans. It does not explain why I have no voice, and the two get confused constantly.

After weeks of too much noise, too many people and too much performing, skills I normally have just stop arriving.

In burnout, writing gets slower, school gets heavier and everything social costs double.

Rest fixes it. Pressure extends it.

My total emotional score is high, with interpersonal reading and self-perception higher still.

Stress management is the low one, which fits a boy whose early years taught my body to expect trouble.

High EQ and autism are not a contradiction. I read rooms carefully. I just read them in my own way.

Knowing what to do and being able to begin it are two separate skills, and autism makes the second one expensive.

Routines, lists and predictable days do more for me than motivation ever has.

When a task stalls it is usually the start that failed, not the interest.

Looking away helps me think, and being made to look up spends the attention I needed for the answer.

I am often listening hardest when I look least like it.

Ask for the answer, not for the face.

My full scale IQ is 142, with verbal reasoning at 155. That is the part people quote.

My working memory is 92 and my processing speed is 108, which is why I need one task at a time and enough time to finish it. Gifted on its own hides that gap and sets expectations I cannot always meet on demand.

My full-scale IQ is 142, with verbal reasoning at 155 and fluid reasoning at 152.

The same report puts working memory at 92 and processing speed at 108, which is the part people forget when they hear the top number.

A high IQ does not make school easy. It makes the gap between what I understand and what I can deliver on time much wider.

Hints, heavy sarcasm and vague deadlines land badly. Direct sentences land perfectly.

I understand jokes. I just cannot guess a rule nobody stated.

Being direct with me is not being blunt. It is being clear.

Masking is the effort of hiding autistic responses so a room stays comfortable for everyone else.

It works, which is the trap. The people who see me masking assume school is easy, and never see the hour of nothing afterwards.

Places where I do not have to mask are the ones I keep.

A meltdown is what happens when input has outrun the capacity to process it. It is involuntary.

A tantrum has an audience and a goal. A meltdown has neither, and it does not stop because someone offers a reward.

Fewer people, less light and less talking help. Questions do not.

This is the part of my profile that sits near average while my reasoning sits far above it.

The gap is real and it shows up as needing more time, not less ability.

Timed tests measure the slowest part of me and then report it as if it were the whole boy.

Strip lights, echoing corridors, crowds and layered noise stack up rather than blending into background.

Overload is the road to both meltdown and shutdown, and it is far easier to prevent than to fix.

A quieter room, sunglasses indoors or ten minutes alone are not preferences. They are maintenance.

Where a meltdown goes outward, a shutdown goes inward. I stop typing, stop moving much, and stop being reachable for a while.

It is easy to miss in a voiceless child, because the surface already looks quiet.

It ends on its own timing. Sitting nearby without demands is the whole job.

Rocking, tapping, spinning a pen and pressing my hands together all do the same job: they keep the volume of the world manageable.

Stopping it does not make me calmer. It removes the tool and keeps the problem.

Everyone stims. Some people just get told off for it.

It describes a child whose abilities and difficulties are both far from average, which is precisely why plain averages describe me badly.

My verbal reasoning and my processing speed live in different worlds, and school only works when both are planned for.

I find the phrase accurate but stiff, so I rarely say it out loud, or rather types it.

Long spoken instructions fall out of it before the end of the list.

Written steps solve almost all of this, which is why I ask for things in writing.

A low working memory score beside very high reasoning is uneven, not contradictory.

A typical circadian rhythm sits close to twenty-four hours and gets nudged into place by daylight.

Mine runs closer to twenty-five, and the nudge does not land, so sleep drifts later every single day.

That is Non-24, and it is a clock problem rather than a discipline problem.

Free-running means the rhythm keeps its own time instead of locking to the day outside.

Every few weeks my good hours travel all the way round: mornings, then evenings, then the middle of the night, then back.

Plans that assume a fixed bedtime are the ones that break first.

Timed melatonin and timed light are the usual attempts to anchor a free-running rhythm.

They help some weeks and not others, which is normal and still frustrating.

It is prescribed and monitored, not something bought casually off a shelf.

My internal day runs around twenty-seven hours, so my sleep drifts forward until it circles back around. It is a diagnosis, not a habit and not bad discipline.

Practically, it means schedules are booked around drift, and a missed morning is a body clock, not a lack of effort.

Dark rooms, no screens and fixed bedtimes do not stop a body clock that runs near twenty-seven hours.

Being told to try harder at sleeping is the Non-24 version of being told to try harder at speaking.

What actually helps is a school and a family that plan around the drift.

Hypopituitarism is followed by an endocrinologist, who watches growth, energy and the hormone levels behind both.

Appointments are frequent, boring and mostly numbers.

It is the reason my medical calendar looks nothing like a classmate's.

Hypopituitarism means the pituitary gland does not release enough of certain hormones, growth hormone among them.

That is the reason a fourteen year old is often read as nine, and the reason my medical calendar is busier than my friends'.

It is treated and monitored. It is also nobody's opening question.

Partial hypopituitarism affects my growth hormone and puberty, and I am around 130 cm tall. In everyday conversation I usually just say I am small or tiny and leave it there.

I do not use injury wording or anything dramatic for it. Guessing my age from my height is the most common mistake people make. My understanding, reading and consent are those of a fourteen-year-old.

I take what my endocrinologist and my psychiatrist prescribe, and both are reviewed regularly.

Medication manages things. It does not remove the reason they exist.

Whether I take any is a medical detail, so it belongs with my mum and my doctors, not in conversation.

Short stature is the medical wording for a height well below the range expected for my age.

I do not use it socially. I say I am small, or tiny, and move on.

What I ask is that people match their behaviour to my age rather than my height. Being spoken to like a nine year old is the daily cost of this one.

I was physically and emotionally abused in my early childhood, and there were long stretches of neglect around it. I write abuse, because that is what it was.

I do not use softer wording like a difficult start, a rough home or strict parents. Those phrases were used by adults at the time, and they are part of why it continued for as long as it did.

I also do not owe anyone the details. The word is enough. What I am willing to describe I have already put in my poems and in the story chapters, and anything I left out was left out on purpose.

Adoption is a legal and permanent event. It is finished.

I am not an adopted boy in every sentence, any more than anyone else is a birth-family boy.

It is relevant when the topic is my early years and irrelevant the rest of the time.

Thirteen children live in this family and I am one of them.

In writing about the care system, the adjective is useful. In writing about a Tuesday, it is noise.

My mum is my mum. That is the whole rule.

My anxiety is diagnosed and it is general rather than attached to one fear. It runs underneath ordinary days, especially ones with unplanned changes in them.

Telling me to relax or to just try is the least useful sentence available. A clear plan for what happens next works far better.

Early neglect teaches a small child that adults are unpredictable, and that lesson does not unlearn itself on the day the paperwork is signed.

With me, trust arrived slowly and in order: predictability first, then warmth, then reliance.

Turning up on time did more for me than any dramatic gesture ever has.

Asking about my real parents suggests the family that raised me, fed me and learned to sign for me is a substitute. It is not.

Birth family or biological family is the neutral term, and I will answer questions about them when I choose to, which is not often and not on request.

Complex PTSD comes from harm that was ongoing and inescapable, which is why it shows up in how I trust, how I sleep and how my body reacts before my thoughts catch up.

It is a diagnosis, not a description of my character. I use the abbreviation in most sentences and the full name when someone is likely to confuse it with ordinary stress.

Depression sits alongside the C-PTSD and the sleep disorder, and the three of them make each other worse when my rhythm slips.

I write about it because hiding it would make the rest of the site dishonest. I am not writing it as a cry for help, and I would rather not be handled carefully because of it.

It is a protective reflex learned early, and it still switches on without being asked.

In a voiceless child it is easy to miss, because the outside already looks still.

I come back on my own. Being there when I do is the useful part.

A flashback is not a thought about the past. It is the body running the past again at full volume.

During one I cannot type, which is the part people find hardest, because my usual way of saying stop is unavailable.

Space, quiet and no questions. It passes.

Before my adoption I moved through the care system, and each placement meant a new set of adults learning, or not learning, how to talk to a child who writes.

I say placement rather than home for the temporary ones. Home is a word I keep for where I live now, with my adoptive family in Szczecin.

Cold water, counting objects, a familiar texture, writing one plain sentence about the room I am actually in.

My grounding routine is deliberately boring, because boring is what works.

Ask what helps. Do not improvise on my behalf.

I know where the exits are in every room I enter, and I notice the moment a voice changes pitch.

It is exhausting rather than dramatic, and it is one reason a normal school day costs me more than it looks like it should.

Predictable rooms and predictable adults quiet it down.

For a voiceless child, neglect is specific: nobody checks, because I cannot call out, and silence is easy to read as fine.

I name it separately from abuse because people tend to picture only the loud kind of harm, and the quiet kind shaped just as much of me.

A psychiatrist diagnoses and prescribes. A therapist does the weekly work. They are different jobs and people mix them up constantly.

Appointments have to be AAC-accessible or they measure the wrong thing entirely.

Nobody in my life treats seeing one as embarrassing.

At school it means a plan exists before anything goes wrong: who I go to, what happens when I leave a room, who does not get told what.

Good safeguarding is invisible to everyone except the child it protects.

It is the difference between being believed quickly and having to prove things.

I accept victim in a legal or clinical sentence, where it is a category. Outside those, it puts the person who hurt me at the centre of my own biography.

Poor thing, tragic and broken get the same answer. I am fourteen, I write, I have a girlfriend, I argue about football. The abuse is a chapter, not the book.

My sessions are written rather than spoken, which takes a therapist who is comfortable with silence and a keyboard.

The work is slow on purpose. Nothing about C-PTSD gets fixed in six neat appointments.

I would rather people say therapy plainly than lower their voice for it.

Trauma is the word for the mark left behind, which is why it lives in my body and not only in my memory.

It explains why some ordinary rooms cost me more than they cost anyone else there.

It does not explain my sense of humour, my marks, my poems or my opinions.

It changes the reading of ordinary behaviour: a child who bolts is frightened, not defiant.

It is not therapy and it does not require anyone to know my history in detail.

It mostly requires patience, consistency and not taking a reaction personally.

A trigger is a sensory or situational cue that sets off a trauma response: shaking hands, a locked jaw, a flat stare that looks like rudeness and is not.

Raised voices, being grabbed and being cornered in a doorway are the reliable ones. Naming them is not fragility, it is maintenance.

The casual use of triggered as a punchline is the one bit of internet slang I genuinely dislike.

What I share about my early years, my body and my family is my decision each time.

A boundary I set once still stands the next day, even if the answer would be convenient.

Respecting them is the entire test of whether an adult is safe.

Photographs, questions about my body, touching my shoulder to get my attention, sharing my writing: all of it is asked first.

A voiceless child gets asked less often than other children, because saying no takes me longer and interrupting me is easy.

That is exactly why the asking matters more here, not less.

I am in ordinary classes, doing ordinary work, with extra time and a written route for questions.

Access is arranged around me instead of me being moved out of the room.

It works because the plan is boring, agreed and actually followed.

I model because I like the camera and the quiet of a set, where nobody expects talking.

The job needs stillness, timing and instruction following, all of which I am good at.

It is not therapy and it is not inspiration. It is a job with call times.

I write poems and publish them, which is the entire qualification.

Poet, artist and student come before voiceless in my own description of myself.

The silence is a fact about my throat. The writing is a fact about me.

Modelling photos are published on purpose. Clinic letters, therapy notes and school reports are not.

Filming a voiceless child without asking is easy, which is exactly why consent matters more here.

If it would need asking for any other fourteen year old, it needs asking for me.

Being a twin means growing up beside someone the same age, which makes every difference between them visible.

People compare heights, voices and school reports without meaning any harm, and it lands anyway.

The kind version is to ask about them separately.

It rarely looks like cruelty. It looks like talking to the adult beside me, or being surprised I write well.

I name it when it happens, calmly, and then carry on.

Being told it was not meant that way does not change what it did.

Extra time to type, a seat near the door and a quiet room during exams are accommodations.

None of them make a task easier. They make the task possible to reach.

Calling them privileges is the fastest way to end a conversation with me.

An advocate makes room for my words and holds the door open while I type.

The version I object to is the one where an adult explains me to a room while I am sitting in it.

The test is simple: after the meeting, whose sentences got recorded?

My mum and the professionals around me are carers, and that word carries real work.

My friends are friends. Calling a fourteen year old's girlfriend or classmates my carers rewrites the friendship as a duty.

A girlfriend is a girlfriend. That is the entire job title.

I am fourteen. Child is the word I want in writing, in clinics, in castings and in captions, because it carries respect and it carries rights.

It also keeps the record straight when adults treat me as younger than I am. A short, voiceless child is still a fourteen-year-old child.

Disabled is not an insult and does not need cushioning.

Softening it suggests the plain word is shameful, which is the opposite of what I believe.

Say disabled, or say what is actually true: I was born without vocal folds.

I am disabled. The word is useful because it names the access I need and the barriers that are put in front of me.

Softeners like special needs, differently abled or challenged are not kinder; they blur the actual request, which is usually time, quiet and room to answer.

Being called inspiring for getting through a normal day tells me that the expectation was low. I would rather be read closely than admired vaguely.

The same goes for suffers from and confined to. I live with my diagnoses, write about them, and would like the compliment to be about the writing.

Kid has a slightly degrading sound to it, especially from adults who already talk down to me. In articles, briefs, school notes and casting sheets, child is the word.

I do use kid myself, in poems, when the smaller, rougher sound is the point. That is a choice inside my own writing, not an invitation.

I need to read, write, be given time and not be shouted at. That is not special, it is just access.

The phrase is mostly used to make adults comfortable, and in school files it has a habit of travelling with lowered expectations.

It covers typing time, seating, fire alarms, cover teachers and what happens on a Non-24 night with no sleep.

Written down means a substitute teacher cannot accidentally undo it.

I read my own plan and asked for changes, which is how it should work.

Nobody is bound to a wheelchair. A wheelchair is what makes movement possible.

It sits in the same family as calling my tablet a crutch, or saying I am trapped in silence.

Tools are not cages. My tablet is a door.