Unable to Speak or Connect to the World Until Age 11, Carly Fleishman Types: ‘I Am Autistic But That Is Not Who I Am’

By ALAN B. GOLDBERG and LAUREN PUTRINO
Aug. 6, 2009

Her finger hovers over the keyboard, sometimes for hours, before she painstakingly begins to type:

“You don’t know what it feels like to be me, when you can’t sit still because your legs feel like they are on fire or it feels like a hundred ants are crawling up your arms.”

Something extraordinary happened to Carly Fleischmann, a severely autistic 14-year-old who, unable to speak, was once written off as mentally deficient.

“It is hard to be autistic because no one understands me. People look at me and assume I am dumb because I can’t speak.”

There are experts and skeptics who believe that nonverbal people like Carly are incapable of thinking or writing.

“I think people get a lot of their information from so-called experts but if a horse is sick, you don’t ask a fish what’s wrong with the horse. You go right to the horse’s mouth.”

Watch Carly’s story on “20/20″ Friday at 10 p.m. ET