#5

Closing Speech

By Harriet Corke

Illustrations by Jiatong Liu

Telling people about mutism always felt like a paradox to me. I mean, talk about a betrayal. What would my younger self think?

All of the experiences I have written about so far are highly personal to me. They are not universal, but I felt and will always feel that they are worth sharing. All of these things that I was forced to feel silently deserve to be honoured in the present.

There are many people I wanted to address in them. Friends, strangers, teachers; those with little understanding and those who want to learn. Those who know me and those who don’t. Those who know my present self and not my past.

But the aim in addressing this topic is not just to speak my own truth. The world hears enough from me these days. Besides, there is someone that I never seem to make time to catch up with. So this last one is for her.

To: Miss Harriet Corke, The Past, Essex.

From: Miss Harriet Corke, The Present, London.

Dear Harriet,

A few years ago Rebecca - yes, you’re still friends - said, “It's funny: you used to never speak, but now you don’t stop talking.”

Which is a read, but also not untrue.

There’s lots I want to say to you; unfortunately they’ve imposed a word count. (You’re a writer now, by the way. Sadly none of your novels about runaway orphans have been published yet, but you’re only 24 so there’s still time.) With this in mind, I’m just going to hit the key points:

You have a pretty standard voice. You speak clearly, articulately, and often. Too often, some would say. But they don’t know that you are just making up for lost time.

You actually have a lot of friends. They all know you’ve been mute. They don’t care.

London is home for you now. (Do you remember it? It’s a big place with a big river and a big bridge that opens up in the middle. You fell off it in a dream once.) You like to explore it on your own, and often take pointless bus or train trips to random places just so you can walk around somewhere new.

Your life is pretty normal. When you’re not writing, you work in an office (!) and on the weekends you go to the theatre and the park with your friends. You like reading and knitting and terrible jokes. (Especially your own.)

In other ways, your life is quite extraordinary. You have transitioned from being unable to speak to filling your life with words. You love people; you love language. You find such joy in communicating, in the freshness of conversation. Of course you still get nervous - public speaking is nauseating - but your resilience stops you faltering.

You are the exact opposite of what you thought you’d be. A fully functioning member of society - and a happy one at that.

What else is there to tell you? Two of your best friends live in Yorkshire. They’ve made four Shrek movies. Jacqueline Wilson is still writing. Those French classes never paid off, but you can say “There’s a spider in my room” in Swedish. Oh, and there’s a global pandemic sweeping the world. (I’ll get back to you on that one.)

Ultimately, being mute hasn’t damaged you. It hasn’t helped you either - but it's nothing to be worried about. The past isn’t a badge of shame you have to wear forever; it is fluid and open and yours for reclaiming.

Everyone wants you to worry about the way you are. But there is no need to. Mute or not, you have a life worth living.

Det är en spindel i mitt rum,

Harriet xxx