Editor's Note:  This is excerpted from Sharisa Kochmeister's keynote address to the "Facilitated Communication in New England" conference, held in Portland ME in May, 1997.

I sit before you in my continuing effort to shatter the walls that separate me from you and us all from each other in so many ways. Because I am largely unable to speak, I type what I think and feel. Typing has shattered countless walls for me in more ways than anyone, including me, could ever have imagined. It is a method of expression and freedom I find nowhere else.

Almost as much as my various "disorders" disable me, typing enables me. It allows me to communicate with and exist within a world where I was and would otherwise still be a total stranger. It lets me show other people that I (and therefore, possibly other "non-verbals") am alive and smart, understand, think, feel., hope-, plan, and dream just like verbal people.

Even more exciting is the way people react to things I say in my conversation, poetry and prose. Whenever I get a strong reaction, be it delight, realization, surprise or shock, I know and am glad that what I've said is meaningful and important. If I can make people think, help them change and grow, and get them to forget what they think they know and alter their learned perceptions of disability and reality, I have accomplished my ultimate goal -- being the best, most effective me I can possibly be.

Getting my message out is important to me! I love to write because words are a constant source of delight and amazement to me. If it weren't for words on screens and on paper, nobody would know I even have a mind. I spent in excess of 11 years (ages 1 to 13+) with no way to communicate because I was and still am, almost completely non-verbal. Although I readily understand spoken and written language, I am dyspraxic. This is the first wall I had to overcome, and it still holds me back in many ways.

I compare dyspraxia to inertia. Inertia, as I understand it, is inability to move unless something else makes it possible. I easily relate to this. Dyspraxia is best defined in laymen's terms as an inability to make one's muscles do what one wants without great difficulty or assistance. Sometimes, it makes me "freeze in my tracks" or "forget" how to move, walk, chew, or swallow. It makes it difficult to do something as seemingly simple as nodding my head or shaping my fingers for sign language or walking downstairs alternating feet or using my eye muscles properly or my mouth, tongue, throat and facial muscles to speak clearly.

For 11 years, I had no way to communicate because I couldn't speak, or use sign language effectively because of what I call my "dyspraxic inertia." People fully believed I was "hopelessly retarded" since I couldn't express myself or respond well.

When I started to type, I needed my hand held and index finger supported. Over time, I moved to wrist support, elbow support, a hand on my shoulder, and just having someone's hand "shadowing" mine. All these kinds of "facilitation" made it easier to overcome my inertia; but they also caused people to question whether it was my hand or that of my "facilitator" actually typing.

I finally became an independent typist because of those doubts that became the ultimate motivator in overcoming a large part of the frightening "menace" of my "dyspraxic inertia."

My mind, however, is not dyspraxic! It has been stretched and stretching since the moment of my conception. My capacity for learning, storing, accessing, and utilizing information and ideas seems infinite beyond belief. Sometimes, though, I feel very restricted by the boundaries of this body that traps and holds me, disabling me from going where my mind wishes to go.

I believe my severe seizures and monstrous migraines are simply somatic symptoms that reflect my mind's avid attempts to shatter those shackles and engineer its escape. My mind yearns to boldly burst bonds and bars, wither walls, and fly freely where no mind has gone before. Its "final frontier" is not just space, but time. I know I must attack my dyspraxia to release my reality, remove my restrictions to increase my ingenuity, and free my feelings to unharness my uniqueness. If I set my mind free of its formidable fetters, I know I will surely and swiftly soar through space, trek through time, revel in realization, and deliver discoveries utterly undreamed of in our own terribly tattered temporal plane of pain.

Consider the following:
DON'T JUDGE THOSE WHO TRY AND FAIL; JUDGE ONLY THOSE WHO FAIL TO TRY.

I was asked to react to this quote by a writing teacher, and it made me think of another wall I have had to breach, standardized testing. Here's what I said and truly believe:

I'm an extraordinarily apt example of the inherent wisdom of the above words. For most of my childhood years, I was, to even the most "objective observer," a failure at being "human," as defined by societal standards and medical "norms."

Unfortunately, these standards and norms were designed by and decided upon by verbalizers for verbalizers, and are not remotely applicable to 'non-verbals' who have no other method of communication available.

These types of tests and scales that purport to measure "intelligence," are, however, still administered quite cavalierly and interpreted rather unfairly. This is all done with no regard for severe scoring discrepancies, demeaning diagnoses, lousy labels, and life-altering pronouncements, prognostications, placements, and recommendations as a result of inherently biased anomalies.

Given all of these injustices, failure is the only guaranteed outcome -- a failure in this case that results in a verdict of "brainless," and a completely unjust sentence for the poor person being 'tested" of life-long imprisonment in the world of the 'hopelessly retarded." There are no "pardons" or "clemency" available, but in exceedingly rare instances, even these "living-death" sentences have actually been "overturned" because "new evidence" has finally "come to light."

Let me explain in the most personal of terms. I did not immediately magically become or start getting treated as "really intelligent" when I suddenly became "able to type."

I had to attain "genius level" results on a wide battery of tests and "scales" in a variety of settings with different "examiners" from different "disciplines" before most of these people "in power" were willing to give me "credit' for more than a "modicum" of intelligence and cognitive abilities.

I eventually succeeded at "proving" I am "human." Then (and only then), was I finally "rewarded" by 'them," not for merely "trying" -- I was required to 'succeed." Unfortunately, despite my success, I'm still frequently required to "prove" myself. Will "trying" ever be "enough" for me and others "like" me? It certainly doesn't seem that way! What a loss it would have been to this world if when the renowned astrophysicist, Dr. Stephen Hawking, lost his ability to speak to Lou Gehrig's Disease, people had automatically assumed he had also lost his ability to think. The same, obviously, holds true for Helen Keller. Given this, why should the assumption be that one who was not born with the ability to speak must also have not been born with the ability to think?

All of our lives must have meaning for us to feel we 'belong" in this world.
It took me far too long to find my own meaning.
I don't want the same thing happening to anyone else.

We can't allow other people's opinions of us or what they believe is real to control our lives or get us down.

IMAGINATION'S INCREDIBLE IMPACT, INFLUENCE, AND IMPORTANCE

It is far too often said of people with autism and other disabilities that we "have NO imaginations."

Imagine someone saying that about you?! Imagine how it would make you feel! Horrible, huh?

I won't pretend to speak for or represent all autistics, but I and several others I know have extremely vivid imaginative powers and enormous creativity.

It is, in fact, imagination alone that prevented me from shutting down my "self" and shutting out the world entirely!

It was and is my imagination that enabled me to create defenders and protectors within my own mind that prevented me from losing that very mind itself.

It was imagination that gave me a mental picture of myself communicating by typing with support, and later let me see how it would look and feel to type without support and to type alone.

It has helped me write poetry and prose filled with graphic images.

It enables me to hear words and music I write "inside" my head before they are typed, printed, written, spoken, sung or played, and given "lives" of their own.

It has allowed me to dream and to daydream, to hope and to pray, to plan and to succeed, and to envision a very bright future where none had seemed possible.

It is imagination and creativity, hope and faith, and lots of hard (but satisfying) work that will always be there to see me through.