On Stuttering (first of more?)

In the past few months, I've been trying to come to terms with something I've lived with since before I can remember: My stuttering. It was, like the proverbial elephant in the room, always there, but always shoved to the back of my mind. I didn't like to mention it; hoping that it might cease to exist if unseen for long enough. On my "good-fluency days," I could pretend it was gone; a relic of more awkward times like an old, bad haircut. Every now and again though, it would come back up, like a bad yearbook photo, and I would be humiliated and embarrassed every single time.

 

"Oh, yeah, I stutter sometimes," I would say. "It's really embarrassing."

 

I think that was the problem right there; using "stutter" like a sort of hobbyist verb. It always had dirty connotations for me, like smoking or drinking. It was undesirable: I didn't like it but couldn't seem to stop myself. It was a restraint, a constriction, a liability.

 

The biggest trend I've found in what I've come to think of as my "online stuttering support group" is the common belief that a stutter is something that needs to be embraced. I can't "beat" my stutter. I can't "tame" it or "cure" it. Instead I need to accept it as a personal trait and quality.

 

So now, I'm engaging in what's been one of the biggest battles I've ever had with my stutter: Learning to accept it. Learning to think of it, not as something I do from time to time, but as a part of who I am.

 

So hi there. My name's Eric. I'm 20 years old, I'm an animator/illustrator, and I'm a stutterer. I started when I was about 12, with lots of phrase/syllable repetition leading to my pediatrician's advice that my family ignore it and hope for it to eventually go away. My stutter, she said, wasn't a "real stutter" because I didn't block or elongate. The implication, to me at the time, seemed to be that I was lazy, and spoke too fast. This, combined with the sort of teasing that middle-school children excel at, led to my extremely embarrassed and shamed view of "my speech problem." By mid-way through high school, through sheer brute force and determination, I had achieved decent fluency, only stuttering when stressed or nervous. I was proud of myself, thinking I had conquered my stutter and that, so long as I was careful, it could never touch or bother me again.

 

Nope.

 

In my sophomore year of college my stutter started to become more and more pronounced. Suddenly, and seemingly overnight, I started blocking and elongating. Vowel sounds at the start of my sentences were suddenly the bane of my existence, and even to this day I have incredible trouble starting sentences with the word "I." I was confused, crushed, defeated at this sudden shift in my speech patterns. I had thought that me and my "speech problem" had an agreement: namely that it would go away and never bother me again. Now, I was doing what "real stutterers" do.

 

Trying to understand this change, I began to obsessively research stuttering online. and it was there, almost by accident, that I discovered the active online community of stutterers. I'm not even sure how I stumbled across it, but I ended up on a network of stuttering blogs; people writing about their own joys and struggles in dealing with our uniquely unusual attribute. In these people and their writings, I found experiences almost exactly like my own. It was a group and a community that I was unknowingly a part of.

 

So why am I writing this? No real reason I suppose, other than the fact that I feel like I want to give something back to the jolly group of stutterers I found online who helped me learn to accept and embrace something that I used to view with disgust. I can joke and laugh about my stutter now. Laugh about it. My friends have even expressed how they've noticed I'm more comfortable with it. And y'know what? I am. 

 

And I think that's pretty awesome.