when I speak, I have learned to use contractions and vocal tones but still sometimes my speech is choppy. that is, the sentences I make need to be switched around so that they make sense. if I am quoting baseball stats or pokemon evolutions and moves I speak relatively quickly because I am reading off a page from the topic's dossier in my mind's filing cabinets. most of the time I am relatively quiet. my adults talk to me and I respond. they try to get me to use my own words not quotes but sometimes quotes just fit better and my mind can't make its own sentence of equal value to the conversation. my adults use everything to teach skills. when one is teaching me to draw faces, even though what I am working on is a dragon face, she tells me to look in her eyes for a period of time longer than 2 seconds. if I fail to do so, she holds my chin up until I do because it takes longer than 2 seconds to hold a conversation. if i am frustrated or not in the mood I will close my eyes or turn my head.
when I converse with one of my adults, if I spend more that. five minutes on baseball or pokemon they stop talking to me and do something obviously different. this is to show me that people get bored with my topics. I did not used to notice these and kept talking. they would tell me to stop talking and restart the conversation not on baseball or pokemon. I am sixteen and they do this on a regular basis with me. I see each of them at different times during the week and they all have different methods of working with me. most of it isn't done in an office, it is done in a real world setting, like the pool, school, church, or a store. this is so I learn not to be distracted by surroundings when I am talking or listening. when I started learning this in seventh grade I was only forced to make eye contact when listening because it requires multitasking to do both talking and eye contact and as long as I was talking it was good. now I am made to gold eye contact at all times during a conversation.
I do a lot of things alone. I go to the store for Arizona teas or a snack alone. I do not have an aid in school. I do not even have an IEP. I learn to be human from four adults who have managed to look past my autism and see a future, the possibility of changing the world fe the better. it all started with an eleven year old kid who wouldn't talk because she stuttered and couldn't put sentences together in her brain. now it is a sixteen year old who laughs at jokes, smiles when she sees her friends and the adults that work with me, deals with people and is mostly human.