Selective mutism was already part of my life before everything happened with school. In certain situations, under certain kinds of stress, speaking just stopped being available. That was manageable — situational, predictable enough to work around, something I had some understanding of.
What happened after the interrogation was different. It spread. And nobody had prepared me for what that would actually be like.
It wasn't a decision
That's the first thing. It's not choosing to be silent. It's not stubbornness or making a point or refusing to engage. The mechanism just stops working. You know what you want to say, you can form it in your head, and then between the thought and the speech there's just — nothing. A wall that wasn't there before, or a wall that's now much bigger and much harder to get past.
What nobody tells you
Nobody tells you how strange it is to be fully present, fully thinking, fully wanting to communicate — and to be completely cut off from the most obvious way of doing it. You're not absent. You're there. The words are there. The connection between them and speaking just isn't.
Nobody tells you how people respond to it either. Some people are patient and find other ways to communicate. Some people get uncomfortable and fill the silence with assumptions. Some people take it personally. And some people — like the teacher who said "not speaking hm??" loud enough for the whole class to hear during register — use it as an opportunity to say something that lands like a deliberate sting, even if they tell themselves it wasn't.
The isolation of it
The selective mutism spreading meant my world got smaller. Not by choice — just by the reality of what I could access. The people I can talk to in person now are my mum, Claws, and three friends. That's it. That's not where I want to stay permanently. But it's where things are right now and I'm not going to pretend it's fine when it isn't.
What does help
Writing. Always writing. Text is always available even when speech isn't, which is part of why this blog exists and part of why I communicate primarily through text. Online friendships that are built on text anyway — they don't require anything to have changed. The people who know me through what I build and what I write — they get me the same way they always did.
And time. The situation that caused it isn't the situation I'm in anymore. That matters, even if the effects don't disappear overnight.