To show my journey and share my authentic thoughts.

"Hi All, I am Jason. I was diagnosed with severe non-verbal autism. This means that I have been underestimated my whole life.

The first thing that I ask is that you refer to me as a non-speaker and ditch the insulting low functioning label. I am smart, kind, compassionate and empathetic.

I have language cognitively, but my apraxia keeps me from having the motor control that allows me to have reliable and effective speech. It’s what we call a brain body disconnect.

Luckly, my wonderful parents found spelling to communicate. It is how I am able to communicate this to you now. It is not easy to teach my body to reliably point to each letter to spell out my thoughts.

It took two painstaking years to reach the point of sharing snippets of my thoughts and even longer to get to the point of fluency to write this and my first song that I just wrote.

My Dad (Geoff) put this blog together to show my journey and share my authentic thoughts. I hope it can educate the world about the misconceptions surrounding autism and other disabilities.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Jason"

We wanted to share our son Jason’s amazing journey, inner voice, and words with family and friends, and with other special needs families to inspire hope.

In 2022, we brought Jason (age 22 at the time) to the Growing Kids Therapy Center (GKTC) in Herndon, Virginia, outside Washington, DC, to begin working with a spelling board.

We cannot express how life changing it has been to get to know your own child’s inner thoughts, feelings, incredible courage, sense of humor and joy at being heard for the first time in 22 years.

We have kept track of his progress, capturing each letter that he pointed to and the associated words which they formed into sentences. His words and thoughts have developed over time as his accuracy with the spelling board increased and he has been able to better control his body and concentrate.

Thank you for everyone’s love, support and interest in knowing more about Jason’s spelling development and the journey of one family.

Affectionately,

Nomy & Geoff

As many of you know, my little brother, Jason, has autism, and for most of his life has been unable to speak.

For the past few years, we’ve been taking Jason to the Growing Kids Therapy Center which teaches autistic individuals how to communicate via a spelling board.

Jason, and many severely autistic individuals, have what’s known as apraxia, in which they do not have any motor control over their outside bodies.

This is of course why they cannot physically talk, but also is why many such individuals exhibit various tics, impulses, etc. that they cannot control.

And so with this therapy center, we’ve been here for 2 years to just get Jason control of one of his hands so that he can control a pencil, and painstakingly poke various letters one at a time onto a spelling board.

I share this not only because I’m a proud big brother, but to also spread awareness. Never judge a book by its cover.

For most of his life we had no idea just how intelligent Jason was, and that often for a lot of severely autistic people, their outside varies drastically from the person trapped inside.

His loving brother,

Dylan