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Communication - CUNY Presentation
Good evening. My name
is Joshua Akullian and I'm glad to be here. I am a member of AmeriCorps
and a part of the Self-Advocacy Association. I look forward to speaking
wiht you tonight about a loss of voice deciding one's life. What would
you do if you woke up tomorrow and couldn't speak? How do you think it
would change your life?
A life without words is a life going to be a considerable
calamity for the person who can't speak. The ability to speak means one
can converse with others. I like to converse with people too. I am
caring about people wanting to converse with me. Conversing with people
is like being called a person. People like to both speak and be spoken
to. When they can't they both feel they look like they are a lost
person and feel that they are compared to people who can talk. A person
who likes to converse likes to percieve that people want to talk with
him. I always like to call myself a listener and like to listen, but, I
like to converse as well. I am going to listen and speak to you about
my method of speaking.
I use facilitated communication to converse with
people. When I began to facilitate I licked the problem of not being
like other people by not being able to speak. But I lost my cosmic
spell I called my life. I mostly liked being in my cosmic spell but I
called myself a lost person. I liked my life becuase it was safe. I
like facilitated communcation but it is not the same as being able to
talk. Being able to talk enables people to compare themselves to others
who can speak and lets them make conversation with others
independently. Deciding to speak means I need others to help me to
talk. Communication is like my only contact with people. Communicating
with people feels like I am part of the human race. Communication is the
only menas of getting my life to be complete and coalescing with others
as a person.
I both fought to be in the world and to like
communicating with people. I always like to call cmmunication my claim
to speak. It was a letter day when I came to communicate and I listened
to a person calling me a speaker. I like to communicate but I mostly
like to consider myself a listener. Can there be listeners in the world
as well as talkers? I always like to speak when I need to, but I care
about listening as well. Both are important. A person needs to
care about a listener as well as liking a person who talks. When I
listen I coalesce with people I call my friends. I always boast that I
am a loving, caring listener. I claim I am a listener but I like to
talk too.
When you free a person to talk you have to care
about listening. What a person has to do by listening is to accept a
person's complaints, his cares, his feelings and dreams. A person who
listens is being both a caring persona and like an artist, because
listening is an art. Can you hear falling hopes? Can you hear life's
dreams? Some people like to call themselves a listener but they really
only consider a person's speech important. I like people to look at
what a person is feeling too. That looks to me to be most important.
When you lack caring about a person's feeling you listen only to his
words.
Delivering my presentation, I consider it a
presentation of my listening to others' cosmic worlds. We like to
communicate with speech but there are other ways to communicate as
well. A communicator needs to hear both ways of communicating. Forming
communication always comes last. A person is acalled a communicator
when he can care about others. Can you listen to a non-verbal autistic
person silently communicating? Really communicating is like being in
the cosmic spell with them without calling them names or judging their
loss of language. Thank you.
-This speech was delivered at The City University of New York.
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