When you see an empty thought bubble, what do you imagine is in it. I don't know about you, but I usually imagine words in there. But, I am coming to a slow realisation that I do not think in language. Maybe none of us do, but for whatever reason, I have come to believe that it takes longer for me to move my thoughts into language than most other people. Actually, it is more than that. I actually do not naturally move my thoughts into language at all. Into doing or action is the first place I put my thought. It isn’t that I do not appreciate language or that I have not learned to operate language. I love a good speech or story or film. I love to play with language and to put words into unexpected contexts. But on a deeper level, language is just an overlay, and a rather limited and imperfect one, where much is lost in translation.I get frustrated sometimes when people misuse language or fail to consider that language and thought are not synonymous. And as I reflect on why I change what I am doing in response to something my wife says before I verbally respond, sometimes even neglecting to verbally respond, not out of malice or out of some need to obscure my motive but simply because the language overlay does not engage: my mind just skips over the unimportant bit. Or when in the midst of a sequence of activities and suddenly asked for verbal information, my first reaction is to perform to the request rather than to construct a linguistic response. Not because I do not want to explain it in words. It is just that when I go for that kind of explanation, if find myself stopping to sift through language. But in fraction of a second I can just perform it, and it is done, no sifting.
As an experienced COTA, it is tempting to throw a label on this, perhaps even hypothesise a language deficit. But that would ignore that I have been like this all my life as well as my high level of academic and public-speaking performance. Whatever this is does not reach the level of a deficit. My language is not broken, it just is not my first stop. I wonder if my infatuation with ballet and my subsequent passion for occupational therapy were somewhat informed by this predilection toward nonlinguistic thinking. I still can recall how overwhelmingly satisfying it was to express myself with life force through my entire body in the medium of dance. Just using my lips and larynx to express myself is so pale in comparison, like the the difference between the memory of a dream and the actual full experience of sentient reality. And although many therapists dare not to venture past physical and linguistic aspects of occupation, I would argue that the most beneficial outcomes in occupational therapy come from those difficult to quantify levels of acceptance and confidence in the latest and different incarnation of ourselves following a devastating event that comes from being and doing way before there are words to put to it. It has always been these aspects of the therapeutic process that I have found most intriguing.Photo Credits
Thought Bubble: The Jason Jack
European Day of Language: Istanbul'daki Yunanistan
