Let's T-talk About S-sstuttering
Why don’t you know anybody who stutters?
If you’ve met me in the 3D world, you probably at one point asked me what my name was and heard me respond: “uhhh, erhm, Jo-, uhhh, uhh Joseph.” On a couple occasions, you may have even heard me fabricate an entirely different name. Maybe you looked confused, maybe you laughed, maybe you asked “did you forget your name?” You likely did not know what was going on. And that’s not your fault.
Despite a growing disability justice movement, stuttering remains misunderstood and misrepresented. Stuttering is often seen as something that can be “overcome,” as depicted in ridiculous stories about celebrities such as Ed Sheeran or Joe Biden who “cured” their stutters through some life hack. Because stories of “triumph over stuttering” are the ones most often told, people who stutter into their adult life are stigmatized rather than accepted as disabled.
Teasing your fluent friends for stumbling over their words when they’re flustered is commonplace and I am not here to cancel you for doing so. Every person has occasional speech disfluencies after all. However, hidden among the occasionally-disfluent masses, there exists stutterers, those of us whose lives and identities are shaped by a physiological disability. This disability is completely separate from the aforementioned “occasionally-disfluent masses,” who stumble over their words every now and then. For the remainder of this series, “stuttering” refers to the physiological disability.
Understanding Stuttering:
People who stutter have no control over when, where or how long their disfluencies will last. We stutter when we are relaxed and comfortable. We stutter when we’re nervous in front of audiences. Sometimes we can recite Shakespeare sonnets with perfect fluency and sometimes it takes six minutes to say the name of our middle school band teacher (this really happened to me).
Experts don’t fully understand why we develop stutters as kids or continue stuttering into our adult life. Prevailing theories include a combination of genetic, environmental, and psychotraumatic factors. The physical mechanics of stuttering are equally confusing. Stuttering is a physiological disability, meaning a disconnection exists between our brains (having a thought and wanting to share it) and our body (turning that thought into words by pushing air in our lungs through vocal folds in our larynx). For myself, this culminates in occasionally ‘blocking,’ a type of stuttering where people get stuck on a specific word. I’ll have a thought that I want to share, such as “wow that’s a nice shiny hat you have on” and start talking, but as I’m saying the word “shiny,” I’ll get a block and the sound refuses to escape my mouth. The ensuing sentence may sound like: “wow, that’s a nice sh- uhh-uhh-uhh- sh-sh-uhh-uhh-uhh-uhh-uhh
sh-sshiny hat you have on.”
We are not alone. One in every one hundred people in the world stutter, which might seem ridiculously high to you. An average 25-year-old has met around 26,000 people, and should in theory have met 260 stutterers, but can you name a single one? (No, we’re not counting Joe Biden but I’ll get to him in a future piece on stuttering.) You probably just charmingly said to yourself either: “yes, I know Joseph” or “nope, I don’t know anybody.” I have two explanations for why.
Firstly, people who stutter are trained to hide their stutters at all costs, both indirectly by society and directly by their speech therapists. When we stutter while reading aloud in class, ordering food at a restaurant, telling somebody our name, or asking the CVS employee where the toothpaste is, we are often met with inquisitive looks or snarky laughter. While this reaction is occasionally malicious, it is usually coming from a place of misunderstanding: people know very little about stuttering. They witness us struggle to say the word “toothpaste” and think “wow that’s so funny, he forgot the word toothpaste.” Regardless of intention, the result for the stutterer is a feeling of shame or otherness. People who stutter are extremely reactive to the responses they get: one confused stare reverberates and replays in our brains for days. And because most people start stuttering as impressionable children, this shame becomes internalized and molds our lives.
The following anecdotes are from my own life, but they are not unique nor exceptional.
Even though food makes me incredibly happy, I used to dread ordering at restaurants. I consistently changed my order based on what menu item was easiest to say, rather than what I actually wanted to eat. I even sometimes entirely relinquished agency and when it was my turn to order, I would hesitantly order the same thing as the person before me. “I’ll have the same thing as her” was easy to say. I stopped doing this only a few years ago.
From ages 10-19 I quite literally schemed every moment of my life to avoid stuttering. I timed bathroom breaks to be out of the classroom when it was my time to read out loud, faked being sick when I had a presentation and even developed a whole system of “word switching” to avoid words that made me particularly stuttery. I skipped doctor’s appointments, ruled out future professions that necessitated public speaking, took Fs on school projects that required presentations, picked my college classes based on what demanded the least speaking, failed to raise my hand a single time in a full semester’s worth of class discussions even when I wanted to contribute. Through this extreme avoidance, I became a “covert stutterer,” meaning I could mostly blend in with fluent people by completely rearranging my life. I was also miserable.
This “covertness” is not possible for every stutterer: everybody stutters differently and we are not all able to hide it. (This video wonderfully describes different types of stuttering).
The second reason I posit you don’t know any stutterers is because we tend to keep to ourselves. Some of us have otherwise bubbly personalities and yearn to be out in the world meeting people, but the fear and shame is too overwhelming. So we stay home on weekends, don’t join school clubs, and altogether avoid social situations. Because stutterers are taught to hide, we have a hard time finding community with each other. This all takes a toll. According to the National Institute of Health, stutterers are significantly more likely to develop chronic depression and suicidal ideation.
You might presume that speech therapy would address the trauma associated with feeling constant anxiety and shame; however, most speech therapists focus on something else entirely. They teach stutterers to alter their speech patterns with unnatural and ultimately futile speech mechanics, causing us to internalize even more shame and hopelessness about the way we speak. These “traditional” speech therapists also force clients into “speech challenges,” where we have to walk up to strangers and practice techniques. Essentially, we are taught that the way we speak is wrong; we must both change our speech and become adjusted to how society reacts to us. I went to three of such speech therapists as a kid and had three negative experiences before finding a therapist who presented a new philosophy: radical acceptance.
Radical acceptance means accepting that some things, such as having a stutter, are outside of your control. While we can not control stuttering, we can slowly unlearn the feeling of shame that rises when we speak. As I started to embrace radical acceptance, I would tell my friends for the first time that I stutter. Because I had been trained to hide this part of myself, not a single one of them had any idea that I have a stutter.
The price of my covertness was too high, and it’s one that millions of people are still paying daily. So what’s to be done?
In part 2 of this series, we will dive into the roots of stuttering stigma (hint: capitalism) and radical acceptance as an antidote.
[Note: If you stutter and want somebody to talk about all these things, send me a message]
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Beautifully written. Objective and personal at the same time. I am married to a stutterer, yet I learned an incredible amount from your post.
The vulnerability, passion, and humor in this piece is beautiful! Proud of you as always