For Non-Stutterers: What it's like to be a Stutterer

For Non-Stutterers: What it's like to be a Stutterer If you’ve witnessed a person suffering from a stutter, had difficulty understanding their condition, or just thought about what a stutterer is actually going through, this post is for you. I am going to provide you with a real perspective from a real stutterer, an account of what is actually going on. I’m not going to complain about hardship or unfairness in my life, but I’m not going to sugar-coat it either. My hope is that this post will provide some information to those of you who are not familiar with stuttering, and maybe even change the way you interact with a stutterer the next time you meet one. The first thing you need to understand is a stutterer is negotiating a human process many people hardly recognize. Fluent speakers go through life deploying fluid communication at work, in their home, and essentially every aspect of their lives. They interact and express their feelings to each other in conversation without much consideration to how their body is actually producing the sound coming out of their mouth. A stutterer experiences a very different process. It is important to recognize how different communication is experienced for fluent speakers and stutterers because it is this difference that causes such confusion among non-stutterers. Many people cannot comprehend why or how someone could be having such difficulty producing words through their mouths. To explain stuttering another way, it would be like if your non-verbal communication took an extreme amount of effort. For example, when someone tells a funny joke at dinner, everyone around would smile and laugh while you contorted your mouth into some weird tense shape, uncomfortably wiping the smiles off the faces of everyone around. The situation sounds weird, and that’s because it is. The reaction you’d receive from your strange mouth is the same reaction you receive as a stutterer. People don’t understand what’s going on. “Why isn’t he smiling? What’s wrong with his mouth?” And suddenly the conversation of the table is abruptly halted. Another example would be if you suddenly found yourself in need of a taxi on a very loud street. Even if you really needed to hail one, say if your wife was going into labor. You’d desperately try to lift your arm up, even lift a finger or anything to signal a driver. It would be such a simple task, to achieve such an important result, but you’d be embarrassingly unable to deliver in the most crucial moment. This is the pain and frustration of the stutterer. Something so simple and so easy to execute for others is so very difficult for the stutterer. Another misconception people carry about stutterers is that they aren’t very intelligent. “How hard can it be to just say the words?” While this falsehood is deeply aggravating, it is understandable how people could reach such a conclusion. It is natural to equate the context and delivery of one’s speech to intelligence because that is how we recognize it in most individuals. It is through speech that we hear about people’s ideas, thoughts and emotions. When all you hear from a stutterer is their tense silence or repetitive consonants, it is difficult to label them as intelligent or at times, even competent. During my adolescence it was very difficult to cope with the fact others could not appreciate how I really thought, and what I really had to say. I will admit that I still occasionally do the “Oh, you know me and my silly stutter, just can’t seem to get this darn thing under control” act every now and then just to play along with others’ assumptions about how articulate I actually am. It’s easier than fighting the uphill battle of saying “actually, this stutter is just in the way of all my perfectly legit opinions”. The lesson to take away from this is that stuttering has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. In fact, you’d probably be surprised to learn a stutterer’s unique perspective could teach you a lot about how humans interact. A notable sports writer who stutters once said something along the lines of “I’ve always thought my stutter meant my thoughts came so quickly to me that my body couldn’t process them in time”. A person who stutters is not stupid. In fact, there’s a good chance they’re smarter than you. As someone with this condition, I can verify the psychological impact of stuttering can be quite substantial. I’m not going to delve into personal issues, or create a charity story for you, but I think it’s important to be aware of just how damaging this condition can be on someone’s personal esteem. Studies have shown that stutterers are hyper-sensitive to others’ reactions, and it makes sense. Imagine if every single time you spoke, the look on the other person’s face faded to an expression of confusion and worry, or worse, awkward deflection. Speaking is something most people truly take for granted. Having dealt with these issues my entire life, the worst part remains the absence of truly genuine conversation with others. It’s such a strong feeling of wanting, to observe on the sidelines as others unload their daily burden and immerse themselves in the company and connectivity of others. They slip into a realm of human interaction that I just cannot enter. I wrote this post because I was tired of seeing the same celebrity pictures of “stutterers” on every website or brochure about stuttering. The way we go about spreading awareness for this condition seems very flawed to me. The concept of “See? Even these famous actors managed to become successful and rich with a stutter” just makes me feel wrong about how we're going about this. Almost none of those people stutter the way I stutter, or stutter the way I’ve seen others suffer through their speech. I want to see a picture of John Smith from Columbus, Ohio who has learned to manage his stutter (not “cure” it), and leads a perfectly satisfying life being a normal human being. I want to see a picture of a Berkeley professor who won a Nobel Prize in physics, something that has nothing to do with speech pathology, on the next stuttering brochure. We need to treat this condition like something that it actually is: a condition that doesn’t have a cure, but also a condition that is as unsubstantial as creed or color. A stutter has nothing to do with who you are as a person, and while it can affect you, it’s about time everyone understands what it actually is. My apologies to the moderators, I hope I didn't offend any of you too much with the comment about the celebrity pictures, and I also realize that this post is a little serious. As I'm certain you know, this can sometimes be a sensitive topic, and while writing, things got a little passionate. But really, thanks for providing such a great sub reddit, and I hope you don't become too upset from the tone of this post.