On stuttering, and rage

Some of you might have noticed that on the Sci Fi Signal podcast, I kind of talk weird, occasionally. To some it's slight, to others it's moreso, but it's definitely there.

This is because I stutter. I have since I was about, oh, eight or so. Maybe earlier. Really, I can't recall a time when I didn't stutter.

Now, I hate that kind of shit when someone says a slight misfortune taught them resilience and made them who they are, and then they deliver this grand inspiring speech and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera… Because we've heard it all before, and I mean, really, life hands you shit – sometimes a little, sometimes a lot – and you deal with it, or you don't. Everyone's in the same boat on that one. Everyone's got scars. Don't proselytize about it unless you've got just an extraordinary amount of them.

But stuttering is, to me, a real pain in the ass. Because I have, unfortunately, by the grace of whichever god you like, chosen to enter a field whose entire focus is words. I'm pretty good at putting the words down on paper, a serene and silent process to be sure, but saying them out loud… that's a headache.

Mostly because stuttering is a dog you never really whip. It never goes away. It's like being an alcoholic – an alcoholic will, for the rest of their life, want a drink at any given point in time. In the same way a stutterer, no matter how well-trained and how zen, could remember mid-speech that they are a stutterer, and have a complete and total relapse.

That's not the tough part, though. Relapses are okay. I'm okay with screwing up readings occasionally (or a lot – I, personally, would never advise anyone to attend any of my readings, unless I've had the chance to get good and drunk beforehand). But when I was a kid – an overly sensitive, overly dramatic, truculent kid – I took it pretty rough. I was not just the kid who knew all the answers to the questions in class, and the kid who wanted to answer every question in class – I was also the kid who couldn't do that because his oral machinery was all fucked up.

It's the older I get, and the more I interact with my family, that I discover that I am an unusually angry person. I thought this was the norm, but it isn't. It's having a kid that's really brought this into focus for me – especially because my son, who's just a little past 1, is an unusually angry baby. He's usually extremely sweet and playful, but, God, if you piss him off… There's almost no calming him down. As my wife (who paid for a lot of college with babystitting) put it, "I have never seen a baby harbor such rage."

He's got the same damn thing I do. And like a lot of parents, I don't want him turning out like me. I want him to avoid things that will ingrain this in him. Because though I'm angry by nature, I'm also angry because ever since I can remember, my mouth doesn't work and I have a hell of a lot to say.

I'm wondering what this has done to me, and if it's made me write what I write.

Because I think a lot of my fiction is powered by rage. It's there in Mr. Shivers and The Company Man in plain view. And in The Troupe it's there in Silenus, most certainly. Sometimes it feels like my fiction is just a series of walls for my characters to beat on.

But I'm kind of getting sick of it. Because this isn't sustainable. Anger wears you out and burns you up. It fucks your blood-pressure and scars your hands. And it's a bad influence on the people around you, especially if you have kids. There's a vain self-righteousness rage grants you for the five minutes before and after it, but it rarely helps, and often hurts. It feels like power, but it's the opposite – because you have no power over yourself.

So right now I'm wondering just how in the hell I get around this, and how the hell I teach my kid to deal with something that I've never figure out how to deal with myself. Things you've lived with your whole life become a part of you – if you're not careful, they define you. And this would be a bad thing to define me. As a person, or as a writer. Because while it might have gotten me to write the things that got me here today, I don't know how much farther it can get me, and it's an unhealthy crutch to keep leaning on, for me and everyone else around me.

Anger's like a coal – it doesn't grow anything. It just sits there, burning.