There is nothing wrong with your stutter.

Order the meal you actually want.

Stick up your hand and ask your question.

Phone and make an appointment.

Take the drive through.

Ask a stranger instead of google.

Volunteer to give the presentation.

Speak.

Be bold. Be inconvenient. Be proud.

And when they look away, stutter louder. When they giggle or stare or ignore, stutter louder still.

Your voice is beautiful, it is irreplaceable, and it deserves as much space and attention as any other voice on the planet.

There is nothing wrong with your voice. Your stutter deserves to be heard.

In this blog post, I will argue that within the ableist viewpoint that predominates the concept of being a stutterer, it is impossible to identify the self or the “I” as the stutterer, because a stutter is always limited to the voice or to the psyche, both of which are separated from the self.

A problem with the pervasive wellness or self-improvement culture is that it views the body as a set of disconnected properties that need to be constantly improved upon. The self, in such a scenario, is kind of a ghost that inhabits the body (and the psyche) but is separate from it. For the goodness of the self to be elaborated, the various properties of the body must be in a constant state of upgrade.

Thus, within an American and broader Western voice, the “I,” or the self, is beyond material problems and is bigger than the histories attached to those material realities.

To say that I am a stutterer is to revel in the contradiction of individualism combined with self-conscious vulnerability.

We are really something more than our bodies. Our society builds a hyper-narcissistic views of the self and then forces a constant effort to maintain certain standards for appearance.

But people have long pursued alternative sets of standards and have rewritten the present ones for all sorts of reasons.

When we say I am a stutterer, the common response, possibly from those who love us might be: come now, you are so much more than a stutterer, you are a writer, a board gamer, a brother, a son, etc., etc

In that response, “the stutter” is relegated to a practical issue or technical difficulty.

But the stutter’s other capacity as an experience that is shared by many people is lost.

People have long been permitted to identify with facial features of familial legacy, with bodily attributes such as strength as a mark of positive morals and with  body art or tattoos as a sign of independent spirit. However, when the peculiar presence of one’s speech or body is made into a zone of professional or hygienic consideration and not as a mark of solidarity, the beauty of human variety is lost.

The popularity of wellness culture has led disabled people to cultivate appearances of ableness, to refuse identification with past negative experiences and to measure things like “fluency” or “passing.”  Yet choosing to track these elements is not really about wellness, but is about the appearance of self-ownership.

To identify with an element of the body that cannot be controlled, as one does when we claim membership in our dysfluency is to identify with a naturally occurring force of public refusal. As the stutter bucks the trends of language, takes up too much time and makes strange and incomplete sounds, to identify with the stutter is to stop commending mastery and order over our own flesh.

When we refuse to participate in criticisms about how our own bodies should be, we remove the distractions that cause us to be angry at the pace and limitations of our bodies and learn to stop casting constant negative judgment about our embodiment and can thus merely “be” our bodies.

However, being a body might be better understood as a kind of material authenticity. When we lose the illusion of an individuality that is so special and unique as to transcend bodily boundaries, we become more familiar with the ways in which histories have been built on top of amorphous and unclear elements of the flesh.

I want to end this blog altering a question I hear too often. “How is my fluency?” is brought up to check our power to pass in the stuttering community. But a more important question for those concerned with disability pride to be asking is, “how is my dysfluency?” and instead question the ways in which their flesh has become contorted, by way of habit, into bizarre ugly incomplete attempts to mimic a gentrified body, at the cost  of truer self-knowledge and self love. I encourage my friends in the stuttering community to ask me “how is my dysfluency?” to check not my performance of normalcy, but my attempts to hide linguistically my disabled self.


-Zach

We at Did I Stutter make the emphatic argument that stutters or slips of speech might be less productive but are certainly not broken. Similarly, in the environmental and animal rights movements, it is a subtle argument that just because wild animals do not produce wealth automatically for industrialists, it does not mean that their existence is a waste.

Wild may sometimes mean “living or growing in the natural environment,” “uncontrolled or unrestrained life.” There is a good argument that perhaps the very reason so many think that the stutter needs to be fixed is that it is wild---it grows without regard to human attitude, without care of productivity and without taking account of industrial efficiency standards.

Like the trees or bugs or animals that populate this earth, stutters happen on their own, they appear to be a nuisance---but if viewed with a sense of care, they might be viewed as thriving in a wild but beautiful manner.

When environmental conservationists ask that animals not be experimented on, that forests not be turned into pencils, that the earth is not looted but is left to languish in its beauty, they hope that intentions to make use of us all are delayed, so that lives and being can pursue a function greater than riches or than comfort.

Similarly, when we at Did I Stutter question the doctrines of speech therapy, we also hope that stutters can pursue a function greater than riches or comfort. In its wild state, the stutter offers an up-and-down syllabic rollercoaster. If instantly correlated to dysfunction, this ride may raise alarms. But if we can enjoy it, we can also enjoy being around it---we can ride dysfluency together, as a community and can show those outside of our community how to enjoy our unusual sounds with us.

If conservation is about leaving what exists in the wild to thrive in its uniqueness, then Did I Stutter pursues embodiment conservation---we view the oddness of the body as a thing worth cultivating. We think that uniqueness in feeling, speaking and touching in unusual ways can offer new bases for friendship and community in an age in which non-profitable types of community are becoming fewer and fewer. The wildness of the thing we aim to protect, the stutter, is a never-ending source of excitement for us. Even as people may attempt to force it into various boxes, rules, theories and cures, it always defies those structures. Similarly, we find the refusal of environmentalist activists as well as animals and plants to go along with a system that aims to turn all things into commodities to be exciting.

We at Did I Stutter hope that environmental conservation and embodiment conservation can go hand in hand. 


-Zach

“If my stutter was the most truthful and sincere part of me then what did it mean to try and change that voice?”

Stutterer and author Katherine Preston asks this intriguing question in her Huffington Post article citing Honest Speech. How do we discuss the concept of authentic voice in respect to the myriad reasons individuals choose to change the way they speak?

It is necessary to first differentiate between alterations related to identity and those related to assimilation, although the two are often intertwined.  

When we talk about stutterers in speech therapy, we are primarily talking about assimilation. This type of therapy is founded in speech pathology, which labels disabled speech as inferior, ineffective, and impeded. Individuals who pursue therapy are influenced by the socially constructed standard of fluency, and they seek to reconcile the difference in their speech. Commonly, the decision to enter therapy is made not by the individual but by parents and educators who mark dysfluent speech as different and attempt to realign it.   

Individuals who enter therapy for reasons related to identity are commonly not stutterers. Preston gives many examples of identity-affirming therapy, including trans* and non-binary individuals. In this case, aspects of a person’s speech are misaligned with their identity and they make the choice to pursue change. They seek therapy not to sound like everyone else, but to sound more like themselves.

Assimilation and identity can be conflated in many cases. The litigator who entered therapy to deepen her voice did so because a high-pitched voice was viewed as incongruent with her identity as a litigator. However, the perception of femininity as ineffective in the courtroom stems from the social construction of maleness as an unmarked trait. And the choice to align a person’s voice with their gender identity is influenced by the social construction of male and female speech traits.

Did I Stutter is not inherently opposed to speech therapy. Our intention is not to shame or judge individuals who pursue therapy for any reason but instead to illustrate the implicit and explicit forces that drive stutterers into speech therapy. The point is to empower dysfluent voices, and to advocate for stutterers to be treated with respect regardless of their choices about therapy. The point is to allow stuttering youth access to proud dysfluent role models and to affirm consent and bodily autonomy at all ages.

-Erin

Writing about my experience with stuttering is a difficult task. It isn't that I find writing inherently difficult, or that I’m uncomfortable with my stutter, but that I am unpracticed in telling a story about stuttering without also telling a story about everything else. Until very recently, stuttering was a thing I kept in my head, a thing I didn't know how to share. It was a thing I never talked about and tried desperately to avoid drawing attention to.

Unlike most stutterers I know, I do not have any experience with speech therapy. I have never been to a speech therapist and I have never had my speech diagnosed. As a child, I was never told that the cause of my speech differences had a name, or that it happened to anyone else. I do know that I began stuttering at a very young age, as even my earliest memories include dysfluency and frustration.

I can recall very clearly an incident in third grade when, after witnessing me navigate an impressive block, a classmate asked the teacher to explain why I spoke so strangely. The teacher looked at me, laughed, and told the student that I had just become too excited, and should slow down when I talk. I remember very little else from that year, but I remember that day perfectly. I remember feeling like I couldn't explain how my mouth felt when I spoke, that even if I found the words, no one would listen long enough to understand. I remember that day as the moment I became an active participant in my own silencing.

Without exposure to other stutterers or to the therapeutic world, I had no context in which to understand my stutter. I knew it was a problem, because it didn't happen to anyone else. I knew I could hide it by avoiding certain words, by answering questions incorrectly on purpose, or pretending not to know the answer. I knew I could hide it even better by not speaking at all. For more than a decade I accepted there was something odd about my speech but I regarded it as just one more thing that made me weird.  

When I was 18 I saw a trailer for The King’s Speech and recognized a piece of myself in the story. I watched it, locked alone in my bedroom in the dark. I was searching for answers, and I thought I had found them. In the span of that film, I went from knowing nothing about stuttering to knowing that I did was called stuttering, and believing that it was caused by being left-handed and by repressed psychological trauma. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what trauma I was repressing. It took several years for me to learn otherwise, when I met another stutterer and suddenly realized that my experience with speech was part of a larger story.

Which brings me back to the difficulty of writing about stuttering; for so long this has been such an individual concern, a thing I had no way to talk about. It is tricky now, to think back and isolate the influence of speech. How is my experience stuttering different from my experience as a woman? How is it different from my experience as a queer person with atypical gender performance? Or my experience with depression, or chronic illness? Surely, the man on the train who runs his hand up my thigh while telling me to smile is responding to my outward appearance. He knows nothing of my speech, but what about the job candidate I am interviewing? When he interrupts a question, is that because he is confused by my stutter? Is stuttering the reason I hate small talk, or is that just part of my personality?

Stuttering is such a central part of who I am and how I interact with the world. I do wonder if this would be different had I spent my childhood in a therapist’s office, had I been taught to dissect and analyze that part of myself as separate from the rest. The idea of speech therapy, with the goal of reducing or eradicating dysfluency seems absurd to me. Why should I allow someone to make me dislike such an innate part of myself? Those who advocate for speech therapy wouldn't suggest that I try to ‘cure’ my gender or sexuality. They wouldn't imply that I could ‘overcome’ kidney failure if I just tried hard enough, so why stuttering?

Sure, it was frustrating to grow up being so markedly different from my peers. I hate how well I trained myself to stay quiet, how I carried my mouth like a loaded gun. But I also recognize that I was battling larger demons than my stutter back then. I have hated every part of myself for most of my life, and that is not something a speech therapist could have changed. When I began conceptualizing my stutter as a positive facet of my personality, it felt like I was finally being honest with myself. I was finally communicating authentically.

Now, I live in a new city. I have friends who value me for the content of my communication rather than the method, who still laugh at my jokes even when I have to repeat the punch line three times, and who listen to me out of interest and not pity. I have found an artistic community that has helped me grow into an honest writer and a confident performer, and allowed me to compete at the national level. So much has changed, and yet I when I write about my history of silence it is as if I am still living it.

It has been 13 years since third grade, but the image of that teacher laughing is permanently seared into my mind. Even now, when a customer looks at me strangely or a barista chuckles at my garbled order, I hear that laugh. I am reminded of how arrogant that woman was, to dismiss my speech as hurried and make no further effort to understand me. How embarrassed I was, to not be able to control my speech. How obvious it seemed that I didn't belong.

And I also remember my voice, and the visibility I am afforded as a poet. I remember the capacity I have for change. I am proud to be dysfluent and to advocate for the voices silenced for being atypical. I am determined to use my voice and my visibility to become a new kind of stuttering resource.  

-Erin

I am tired of avoiding my stutter.

My parents put me in speech therapy in the second and third grades and I hated it. “All we ever do is play games,” I told my parents. “It’s useless.” At the end of third grade, I found a letter from my teacher to my parents about my stutter “problem.” I got mad and ripped it up, and never went to speech therapy again.

In the fifth grade, I had only one line in the school play. In the eighth grade, I convinced my English teacher to allow me to abstain from the speech contest. Throughout school, I would look for classes that I knew didn’t have any oral presentations. Of course, this wasn’t always possible. In ninth grade English class, we were going around the room reading passages from Julius Caesar, which is already difficult enough to recite without a stutter. When it was my turn, I stumbled through a few words, and eventually hit a roadblock. The room was silent for a few seconds, until another kid yelled out, “Spit it out!” Everyone else in the class laughed. I was humiliated, but I also felt confused. What did I do wrong? Sure, I don’t sound like most other people when I talk, but so what? It took me a while to realize the other kid in that class was the one really saying something wrong.

I became good at avoiding my stutter after that. I even stopped referring to myself by my hard-to-say name. It was a skill, but it was also something that I knew I had to address at some point. It was affecting me inside and out of school. The way I was dealing with my stutter was simply making my life worse.

I have just now turned 22, and I'm finally going to do something. I'm going to own my stutter.

To use the cliché Bernard Baruch quote, “Those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.” Why should I cater to other people by hiding what I sound like?

A quote from another blog post on this site resonated with me: “It takes two to stutter.” My stutter is a social construct that does not exist on its own. It exists in the context of a ripped up letter or a ninth grade bully. But it doesn't have to.

- David Kramer

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 

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

Among all the things that stuttering is, it is perhaps first a break in communication. Stuttering is an interruption in the regular flow of how words are pronounced--and, just as important--how words are processed by those who are listening to us.  

I had a job spraying weeds two summers ago and worked with a guy named Mike: well acquainted with everyone, a story always perched on his tongue, and three decades an employee. Parked in a dusty, stale truck one afternoon, Mike and I were waiting out a bout of rain when it happened. Near the end of my somewhat elongated sentence, he snapped to attention with a simple “huh?” I painstakingly repeated myself, trying not to stutter, and again, “what?” This happened several times. While I had been working intensely at speaking and being understood, Mike had put no effort into listening, hadn't even bothered to try. This moment was filled with the sudden and overwhelming realization that I do not, and cannot, stutter alone. Stuttering is rather accomplished between a speaker and a hearer. Or, if one wants to insist that stuttering is a breakdown of communication, it is a breakdown that occurs between the speaker and the hearer. 

If this is true, then why do dysfluent speakers bear the entire load of responsibility for "breaking" communication? Why are we taught to feel ashamed when it takes a little longer to communicate? Why are we taught to loathe our speech (and very often, ourselves) because others don’t want to take a little extra time and effort to listen? If communication is an interaction between speakers and listeners, then the stutterer alone should not be marked as abnormal and disabled. There is a real sense in which listeners who “disable” our speech by refusing to take responsibility for their role in communicating are the “faulty” communicators. We communicate together; and we stutter together.      

In that spray truck two summers ago, for the first time instead of feeling shame for my stutter an entirely unfamiliar response was welling up: anger at being ignored, anger at being excluded.

The realization that it takes two to stutter announced a shift in how I would understand my disability and the response of others to it. I realized that stuttering and the shame it caused me could not properly be explained by the mere physical difficulty of vocalizing certain words. Realizing that my manner of communicating is interpreted as abnormal and as a disability by others because it conflicts with a particular set of values and social structures, I came to  understand that stuttering is not primarily about me speaking “wrong,” but is rather a form of ableist discrimination. This realization allowed me to reinterpret much of my previous experience, as well as my current identity, relationships, and goals. To say this was empowering would be an understatement.

-Josh