selective mutism in children can be cured as a child adapts to school and social situations and shed their anxiety. some carry the disorder with them into later life where it manifests in antisocial behaviour. but how can one explain mutism in adulthood where there was no childhood history? i was not a shy child. i was never afraid of speaking in primary school; i was good at it. then i remember being in secondary school and being able to get up and talk naturally and without self-consciousness to an lt full of people, even if i was sometimes nervous before then. by the time i was in jc i could hardly read from a typed essay to a small roomful. but even then i could get up and speak, i could get up and give book reviews and gp reports during evans's tutorials from notes. in college i didn't talk in class and once or twice froze or made huge blunders of carefully-prepared presentations, but i managed to give them somehow provided i wrote out exactly what i was going to say. but never was there such persistent and involuntary mutism as i experience now, where real terror paralyses one completely. i know that being forced to hold my tongue, being forced for years to give my heart away in scribbled notes and concealed letters, first voluntarily as the mermaid, then without choice as philomena, putting everything into the weaver's work, and the general onset of depression in my final college year - those have taken their toll - but could that have been enough to bring on mutism in adulthood? a classmate said to me last week, as i was trying to creep unobtrusively out of the english department, "i don't understand it: you're so intelligent and vivacious and friendly outside of class - why do you become so frightened and withdrawn in class?" but i can't even say that that is true anymore - even outside of class i find it harder and harder to speak - that with the few people here i can talk to easily - esme, vaughn, rikita - i can appear talkative to the point of babbling high from the relief of being with safe enough to speak. i must ask someone about it.