Life on Delay

by John Hendrickson

How do you make peace with the shame of stuttering? What do you do with all the anger? The resentment? The fear? How do you accept an aspect of yourself that you’re taught at such an early age to hate?

Only since around the turn of the millennium have scientists understood stuttering as a neurological disorder. But the research is still a bit of a mess. Few experts can even agree on the core stuttering “problem.”

Have you ever told a stutterer to take their time? Next time you see them, ask how “take your time” feels. “Take your time” is a polite and loaded alternative to what you really mean, which is Please stop stuttering. Yet an alarming amount of speech therapy boils down to those three words.

This is the tension that stutterers live with: Is it better for me to speak and potentially embarrass myself or to shut down and say nothing at all? Neither approach yields happiness. As a young stutterer, you start to pick up little tricks to force out words. Specifically, you start moving other parts of your body when your speech breaks down.

“Guilt is ‘I made a mistake.’ Shame is ‘I am a mistake.’ ”

THE LOOK IS ALMOST ALWAYS the same. It’s the moment the listener realizes something is wrong with you, that moment they subtly wince. They don’t know whether to interject or to keep waiting while you try and fail to speak.

When you stutter you violate an unspoken deal: people talk this way, not that way. Why are you talking like that? Stop talking like that. Every time I start to stutter I feel a pang of sadness. There it is again. Another imperfect sentence.

Many people who stutter come to dread the act of saying their own name. One reason for this is conditioning: we say our names more frequently than any other proper noun, and we tend to stutter most when we meet new people.

We stutterers anticipate our blocks well before they occur. We know how our brains and lungs and lips confront every letter of the alphabet.

Many stutterers obsess about challenging words coming down the line in a sentence. Some stutterers plan multiple words or phrases ahead to avoid tripping over just one small sound. “This is very similar to obsessive-compulsive thought-process behavior,” Maguire told me.

“People who don’t stutter don’t understand how much strategy is involved, and how much, like, self-preservation there is.”

would love the ability to go around and say hi to people and not feel like the world was going to end,” he said. “And I would love to communicate with whoever I wanted to, and speak exactly how I wanted to, and make people happy, and be able to, like, participate in the thing that everybody does so freely, and I would have such appreciation for the spoken word that I wouldn’t want to miss out on what that feels like, because I thought about what it would be like for so long. I would be funny and I would be caring and I would be articulate, and I would learn a fuck ton of new words just so I could say them whenever I wanted to. I would take up public speaking just ’cause I could, ’cause I would be so happy. I would talk to every single person I saw on the street.

Treating different things the same can generate as much inequality as treating the same things differently.

“The one good thing it gives you is just immense empathy,” he said. “Because you know what it’s like to be picked on, you know what it’s like to be ostracized, you know what it’s like to have people presume bad things about you, even though they don’t know anything about you. You never want that to be visited on anyone else. And I think that’s a wonderful gift that you never lose.”

“The bad gift it gives you—and I’m only going to presume that this is true about you, too, John—is it does give you an anger that is very deep. And I think it’s an anger that comes out of frustration. It’s an anger that comes out of you being excluded, or bad things have been thought about you with no justification whatsoever.”

There’s Morgan Housel, the best-selling author of The Psychology of Money, who, despite being able to speak before thousands at conferences around the globe, told me he still dreads the moment a flight attendant rolls up to his row with the beverage cart.

“And I strongly believe that we have an ethical responsibility to educate these children about how they talk. We need to be thinking about this child when they’re forty, and what can we do for them now? And if all we’re doing is focusing on fluency, then we’re setting them up for failure in a way that I think we’re responsible for.”

You don’t really know what to say. Of course you didn’t forget your name. You know it better than any other word, because you stutter on it more than any other word. In the world Dr. Byrd is working to create, the little girl knows she stutters and feels no shame for it. It’s just one part of her.

think parents are so worried about difference,” Austin said. “But there’s something wider going on in our culture about difference and disability. I feel very lucky. Of all the shit show that the contemporary world is, I feel that it’s a great time to have a child with a difference. Having a child with a difference expands you as a person. I’m cooler with kids with quirks now. I’m cooler with people with all kinds of differences now, because it’s expanded my world a little bit more.”

But what I tried to tell these parents is that what they’re witnessing at a restaurant is one of fifty such interactions in a given day, that they’re not around to protect their child during the other forty-nine. This is a hard truth to hear, but it’s not meant to be upsetting. I want parents to understand that however strong they believe their son or daughter to be, the reality is, they’re fifty times stronger.