In Their Own Words: The Need For Freedom

In this installment of this month’s In Their Own Words series, Asaf shares that spellers need what all humans need. Asaf’s beautiful words came to me through his communication coach, Galilee Damiao. She is an OT and Text-Based Assistive Technology/Augmentative and Alternative Communication Coach and Trainer in Training, and the owner of Accessible Expression Therapies. Accessible Expression Therapies is located in Chestnut Ridge, New York and provides support to individuals with complex communication needs and sensory motor challenges. I am so grateful to her and her students for sharing their insights. She is not only a resource for typing to communicate in her area, but would love to share YOUR thoughts with her students. If you know a speller who would like to correspond with Asaf, please contact her. All of our spellers are excited to hear from others and to know that their words are making an impact!

I would like to start by saying that I am happy to have this opportunity to share with you each about my unique experiences as a person who wants to be able to have what is simple to so many. That is that I am really a real thinking, feeling person! Even though I want to interact in an intelligent, easy way, I end up serving free entertainment on the disability nerve line! I really think that I really want to be able to say that I am the one who is going to save your child. But also I realize that I am in a tricky position myself in terms of freedom.

The thing about freedom is that I am really really free in my real mind. It is the ideas that flow freely; the body doesn’t comply.

I tend to think that people intend to help, but they think that controlling me is the thing that will help. The thing that will actually help is the same for me as it is for you. The thing that one wants and needs as a human being is freedom. The thing that one needs is understanding. I need understanding that I will get, really to think about the new attention that I am getting, and be able to really be in the symphony that is the people in the world who understand.

The first time I typed my thoughts, I thought that I would think that my world would never be the same. I thought that people would so understand. Then the reality was different. I really think that in the world there are times that I’ve been really, really in a dark place – sign in the window reads “Do allow me to have access to my true story.” I think that in not being able to really say what I want to say, that I am really the one to have the ability to change really the state of my own existence.

I think that I am in a wonderful place right now in that I am able to be each time aware of the difficulties and simultaneously get my body to have the calm needed to survive.

Asaf Sucov is a 25-year-old autistic man who types to disseminate his thoughts to the world. Asaf is interested in so many things it’s impossible to narrow it down. He wishes to have the opportunity to have an education, which wasn’t available to him before typing