In her fantastic blog, "How to Stutter More," Emma Alpern, a person who stutters, writes: 

I would like to join Emma in asking the very counter-intuitive question: why would I want to stutter more? It is true, as she writes, that intentionally stuttering desensitizes the moment of dysfluency and can make speaking easier. This is, however, the least important reason to stutter more. Emma continues: "stuttering more has helped me find a new way to talk: a way that was in me all this time, but that I had been struggling against for as long as I could remember."   

What does reclaiming stuttering look like?  

It means choosing what our stuttering voice means. It means denying others the power to define our voices as something shameful, embarrassing, broken, or deviant. It means, like Emma, finding new ways of talking that take our stutter as a central aspect of our voice.

I stutter more because I do not want to live in (nor help create) a world that normalizes bodies and discriminates against those who do not fit in. I take pride in my stutter as a way of resisting communicative expectations that are supposed to make me feel ashamed and are supposed to silence me. Stuttering more and stuttering proudly turns the tables on all those people who assume that, given a choice, I would rather talk just like them. 

I wouldn't. 

These are our voices. 

Deal with it.  

-Josh 

I'm new to this blog so I’d love to do a little introduction. I'm Jacquelyn Revere. I received my Masters in acting and have been pursuing acting in New York City.  I recently started a video blog on Youtube talking about stuttering and my experience with it, and things that have helped me on my journey in a field where speaking is paramount.  I love the unapologetic nature of “Did I Stutter” and am honored to contribute a little bit of my experience to it.

I was asked to present a piece of poetry as a first timer at the National Stuttering Association Conference in 2012. I of course waited till the very last minute to write it and while on the plane to the conference after having writers block I made myself free write for 10 minutes. Out of this came something that I have never consciously thought of before. “Maybe nothing was wrong with me and everything was wrong with the listener. Maybe me stuttering is a lesson for whoever I'm talking to in patience.” I was a little taken aback that I had such a strong opinion supporting stuttering, and I had questioned it a bit, but the concept flowed well with my poem so I kept it. The poem was received extremely well, which lead to the beginning of me taking complete pride in my voice.

The more I explored this concept, the more I understood that 70% of communication is truly nonverbal. If I am telling a person non verbally that I am uncomfortable with my speech and I am uncomfortable with speaking, they will treat me as such. The more comfortable I am while speaking (stuttering included) the more comfortable the listener is. Understanding this then lead me to experiment with different situations and how I could perform my best, and keep myself as comfortable as possible. Through this I then found the power of authenticity. All people want is to connect with another person and an authentic person at that.  My goal now in life is to always be authentic, I admit that I change often and my views shift, but the core of me is the same, and I have found my way of communicating through authenticity.

My experience is that people will wait to hear you speak if you think what you have to say is important enough to be heard. My experience is also that the struggle that I had with stuttering is slowly dissipating the more comfortable I become. I still stutter. I don’t mind that. I enjoy being 1% of the speaking population, I think it’s a cool club to be apart of.  Does my speech test me daily, yes, but I also overcome it daily, and what better way to build confidence?

-Jacquelyn

Ableism, as a reminder, is the discrimination against disabled people in favour of those who are “able-bodied.” Ableism, like racism or sexism, occurs on the individual level (e.g. when we get insulted or ignored in conversation because of how we speak) as well as at the structural level (e.g. society is set up in such a way as to disadvantage us and privilege those who speak fluently). Ableism is a complex thing that takes tremendous work and many years to fight against in order to create more inclusive and welcoming societies.

However, ableism is not just “out there.” It only works because it twists inside the people it targets, in our case, people who stutter. Ableism is internalized from an early age, as ableist assumptions take root in us and we begin to believe them to be true. Assumptions like: we must speak fluently to be taken seriously; we can expect to be made fun of and discriminated against (and there is really nothing to do about it); and, a stutter is not only a problem but is my problem. How many of these things do we simply accept as truth?        

These beliefs are, pardon my french, complete bullshit (poke around on our website to see our views on stuttering and ableism). I know this in my head. I know that stuttering is not really about my body and how it speaks, but about ridiculous ideas of what “normal” speech sounds like and cultural expectations regarding how fast and fluent everyone needs to be. I know that stuttering is more about society than about me.

But the thing is, no matter how disgusting and untrue ableist beliefs may be, over time they become a part of us.    

How do you root out a part of yourself?

We have lived with lies about stuttering for so long that making social changes to the world “out there” may be easier than not hating ourselves and our speech--those quiet whispers that tell us the negative ways people respond to stuttering really is our fault. A central part of reframing stuttering and resisting the medical model is going to be dealing with internalized ableism and changing ourselves. This is difficult work, but I believe it is possible to overcome these lies about ourselves.  

What can we do about internalized ableism? I am certainly no expert as I am still working through the process myself, but here are two ideas:

1)      Education—while this ultimately isn’t the most important one on the list, it is still central. I believe it is difficult (as I mentioned in another blog post) to change ourselves in any lasting way when we still accept the medical model of stuttering: the belief that stuttering is a biological and physiological thing. We need to understand ourselves in other ways that shift the focus away from our bodies and onto social discriminations and ableist social expectations. Sadly, the overwhelming majority of stuttering literature assumes the medical model. This needs to change.     

2)      Community—we need communities that affirm and encourage dysfluent speech. We support self-help groups, but we also need communities that are not based in medical-models of stuttering; communities of dysfluent speakers that can encourage one another enough to imagine their stutters not as individual problems to cope with, but as important and diverse voices in the world.    

-Josh