DID I STUTTER?
  • Home
  • About
  • Blog
    • Contributors
  • FAQ
  • Art
  • Contact
  • Resources

It's Time to Speak Up

8/11/2014

1 Comment

 
Picture
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


1 Comment
Naval link
12/6/2022 03:00:13 am

Whoever wrote this story is brilliant. The conclusion is so great. "A brand is a story. It’s a feeling. A perception. But most importantly, a brand is what your business shapes it to be." I'm a brand journalist and can attest to all the things mentioned in this article. Well done!

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Categories

    All
    Ableism
    Charis
    Cheryl
    Chris
    Communication
    Community Formation
    David
    Disability
    Disability Politics
    Disability Rights
    Dori
    Eli
    Emma
    Empowerment
    Erin
    Gender
    Inspiration
    Intersectionality
    ISAD
    Jacquelyn
    Josh
    Language
    Medical Model
    Notes For Allies
    Passing
    Person-first Language
    Podcasts
    Relational Stuttering
    Review
    School
    Self Help
    Sexuality
    Social Model
    Speech Language Pathology
    Speech Therapy
    Stuttering Stories
    The King's Speech
    Time
    Zach

    SUBMIT

    Authors

    We stutter and we're down with it.

    Contributors

    Archives

    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2017
    February 2017
    October 2016
    September 2016
    June 2016
    April 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014

    RSS Feed


Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.