random bullets of speaking or not

I saw the procrastination group leader (I should really give these people more interesting pseudonyms) again last week. During the procrastination group, she did a few exercises where she gave us prompts and got us to write, so she did that again with me. She said I didn't have to show her what I wrote, which may have made it easier, or maybe just the fact that it was similar to the group. In any case, I was able to write something, which I probably wouldn't have done with the therapist. Even more amazingly, I actually gave it to her to read, although I didn't say anything after that and couldn't even look at her again.
One of the prompts was "If I stopped being a person who had difficulty speaking up, one thing I'd regret about that change would be...". I wrote "people would know what I was thinking/doing and be able to judge me".
The other was "One exception to my inability to speak was at moments in the procrastination group. What made it a bit of an exception was..." "I wasn't talking about anything really personal, or how I felt, and from what other people said, it seemed like they'd experienced the same kind of thing. I didn't talk about the things that I thought made me worse than everyone else."
After I refused to talk again, she suggested that we continue by email, since obviously talking face to face wasn't working.
I like that she got that there were differences between the group and one-on-one, and between speaking and writing, but I'm feeling guilty that I already gave her more of a chance, by letting her read what I wrote, than I've given the therapist.
Anyway, this is what she emailed me. I thought I'd try answering as a blog post first, since that's less scary than emailing her. I think I like the fact that it's a defined task, too.

Make a list of 10 moments in your life when you used your voice, starting with being a baby. So, the first item might be "I made baby sounds"You can list things you know or things you've been told about yourself when you were first learning to speak as a child.You can list learning to read aloud in primary grades.You can list times you used your voice to sing, to cry, to shout, to laugh.A particular time you kept quiet.A particular time you were told to keep quiet (at home or at school)A particular time you spoke something to a parent or a friend.

• I spoke early. I don't remember how old I was when I first started to talk, but when I was two, a friend of my mother's interviewed me for a child development class and was told by the teacher that she couldn't use the tape because my speech was too advanced for a two-year-old.
  

• There's another tape of me singing Incy Wincy Spider and insisting that it was pronounced Pider (I knew it was Spider, but I was just being stubborn and didn't want to admit to being wrong. It irritates me that my family think I really believed that it was Pider, too.).

• I read early, too. I remember reading aloud to the other kids in kindy when I was 3-4 and my mum has told me about impressing adults by reading novels aloud fluently when I was 5 (I don't remember why I would've been doing that. Possibly some kind of IQ testing thing?).

• My mum told me that one day I came home from kindy/pre-school obviously upset, but I wouldn't tell her what was wrong. Eventually, after trying to get me to talk, she sent me to my room and told me I couldn't come out until I told her what was the matter, but she ended up letting me out anyway, when it became clear I'd rather stay in my room indefinitely than tell her.

• I used to put on shows with my little brother, where we would sing/dance/recite poems/act out skits I'd written.

• I had the lead role in a play my class did when I was seven, and memorised and recited poems for drama classes. I don't remember feeling shy or scared about that, but the reason I was doing drama was that I was so quiet and my mum thought it would be good for me.

• I can't imagine performing like that now. Although, there were other times I acted out poems for school, even though I was anxious about it, and I lasted one semester of drama in high school. I managed to force myself to sing alone to audition for the musical when I was in high school, because I really wanted to be in it, but I was barely audible.

• The only negative comments I remember getting on my report cards were that I should speak up more in class.

• I remember crying one lunchtime in grade one. I don't remember why; I'm not even sure if I knew why at the time. In any case, I couldn't articulate why to my friends who were concerned, so I made up some excuse about missing my baby brother, who'd just been born.

• When my parents separated (temporarily, it turned out) when I was 10, they kept asking me how I felt and I didn't know what to tell them (I think I didn't want to make them feel bad), so I wouldn't say anything until they broke it down into yes/no "do you feel x?" questions. And then I'd say "maybe" or "no" or "I don't know", never "yes", in case that was the wrong answer.

• My family used to get really annoyed with me for answering "I don't know" to everything.

• The only person I remember ever yelling at is my older brother, when he would hit me or break my stuff or try to blame me for things. Yelling never accomplished anything, though. He always won the arguments and just kept doing whatever he was doing, anyway.


• I think my mum told me to just ignore him and he'd give up trying to annoy/hurt me when he couldn't get a reaction, but that never worked.


• I used to yell "get" at him whenever he started tormenting me, until my mum told me to stop it because it was annoying to listen to


• There's also the ungame story


• Once I told my brother the theory I'd come up with to make myself feel better, that maybe everyone was weird, just in different ways. He told me "yeah, you'd like to think that, wouldn't you? But you're just a freak." To make it worse, he mentioned the same theory years later, as though he'd thought of it himself.


• I also foolishly told him that I maybe liked the boy who played Joseph to my Mary in the nativity play, in an attempt to get him to tell me who he liked. Of course, he didn't admit anything, but he told everyone what I'd told him, and then my mum told everyone she knew...
  

I've blogged about a bunch of these bullets before, so I'm sorry for repeating myself. I've also emailed the therapist about some of them, too. I went back to read the emails I've sent her, to see what happened that I didn't feel like she got what I said at all, because I feel bad about expecting her to understand when I wasn't doing enough to let her know what was going on. I especially feel bad about the idea of seeing someone else, and hoping they'll be more helpful, because that would suggest that it's the therapist's fault, not mine, that I haven't made any progress.
In one of the emails, I said I felt like I'd told her a lot, but I didn't feel like she really understood, and maybe what I'd said just felt like a lot because I'm not used to saying anything. She agreed that it probably seemed like more than it was, because I hadn't told her much. Reading back over the emails, though, I still think I told her a lot more than she seemed to understand.
I think the reason I didn't feel like she understood was that she kept changing the subject in her replies, rather than responding to what I'd said. I'd write the email, then go to an appointment where I didn't talk, then she'd try to start over again with something completely different. She does this in person, too, in that, while I'm sitting in silence trying to convince myself to say something out loud in response to a question, she'll assume that something new is happening that's making me be quiet, unrelated to the question, so she'll ask something else, and then never go back to the question.
Again, I feel bad blaming her for these problems. I know something that comes up in the bullets is that I can be incredibly stubborn about refusing to talk, once I start not talking. I'm not sure what that's about - just not wanting to admit any kind of mistake? Does it save face to make the not-talking into some huge issue than to just admit I was being silly to be silent? The fear of being judged for whatever I say is real, though, so I guess that's not entirely it.

Anyway, this is incredibly long and rambly already. I obviously have more than 10 points up there and quite a few of them are about not using my voice, rather than using it. I'm not sure if I should send them all or not. If not, which ones should I include?