Hi! This is Aditi Sowmyanarayan, your friendly neighbourhood author, and I am back with yet another account of ‘wacky adventures’ that I get to experience as an AAC user who is determined to unleash my ‘talker’ out in the world at large. If you are a seasoned reader of my column here, you would precisely know the setting, the cast , and most importantly, the incredulous looks and priceless reactions; but for the uninitiated, here is a bit of background. The world around us consists of a majority that is oblivious to the fact that some of us need our iPad to ‘talk’, and when they witness us ‘talking’, the reaction that follows is priceless!
It was just another regular day. I got done with the morning walk, when my mother reminded me about having to buy the nutritional supplement syrup that my doctor swears by, and off we went to the friendly neighbourhood medical store. Along the way, I decided to ask the pharmacist for the medicine myself and typed the medicine name on Avaz, all set to play it in the store.
Sure enough, I did exactly that at the store , as soon as the pharmacist made eye contact with us. It should have simply resulted in the pharmacist looking for the syrup , finding it in a nondescript corner in one of the shelves and handing the bottle over to me, but that was not to
be; for the said person was a noob pharmacist on the first day of his first job, and had, after a long and intense search, handed over the wrong medicine to the customer before us! Sure enough, the irate customer pointed it out, and the pharmacist went huffing back to the deep dark recesses of the store shelves to hunt for the right medicine .
In the meantime, the customer in question decided to put the waiting time to good use by staring at my iPad and trying to figure out what was up with us. Sure enough, with the misplaced confidence of a prick who has instant solutions to stop the melting of the Arctic ice, he looked at my mother and remarked, ‘Single parent?’
I instantly typed, ‘NO’ and was about to type that some of us belong to very loving families that encourage us to gently push our boundaries, when my mother gave this person , ‘THE LOOK’.
Often referred to as , ‘The Resting B***h Face’, this is not to be confused with the art of staring back, and is super effective in putting even the most annoying of pricks in their place . As was expected, the person turned to look away and stopped bothering us.
As I made a mental note to practice my ‘Resting B***h Face’- an incredibly useful skill to acquire, I pondered over the fact that broken families are a lot more common in our universe than we
care to accept. While I am no expert on relationships, I do believe that there are two ways to look at a disabled person- as a problem to be solved or as a life with possibilities . When we choose the
latter, we help the disabled person find their voice, their strength and we mentor them to build on their strengths that open up the possibility of a life of identity, achievement , worth and meaning.
It all begins with a simple perception. So dear reader, if you are a parent or a professional working with someone with complex communication and other needs, choose wisely!
Avaz Megaphone is a platform for neurodivergent individuals to express themselves through the written word. We accept opinion pieces, short stories and poetry. Authors of accepted works will receive an honorarium. To make a submission please email us on: collaborate@avazapp.com
WRITTEN BY
Aditi Sowmyanarayan
Student & Writer
Aditi Sowmyanarayan is a nineteen year old who uses Avaz, a text to speech app, to communicate. She goes to Ishanya India Foundation, a special school in Bengaluru. Aditi is an avid blogger and an aspiring writer. She blogs on www.smallstepbigthought.blogspot.com
She can be reached on Instagram at writeaditi and on her Facebook page : small step big thought
