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?

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.

No matter how many years pass, no matter how numb you become, The Look never leaves you.

Every time I start to stutter I feel a pang of sadness. There it is again. Another imperfect sentence. Another delay I’m adding to the conversation. Another time someone’s gaze will drift from my eyes down to my mouth, where the car crash is happening.

When a person of authority tells a young stutterer to “use your techniques,” they are confirming the stutterer’s worst fear: no one is listening to what you say, only how you say it. Enough of this makes you not want to talk at all. Fluency techniques may work in a therapy room, but, in most cases, they’re extremely hard to deploy in the real world. Speaking like a robot is not natural. There’s the voice in my head who reads this sentence, and a much different voice who reads it out loud. The two voices hate each other. They spend every day fighting for control, meaning neither is in control—I’m not in control.

“I think the hardest part is pretending that it’s not there,” he said. “I don’t know—it’s funny. It does sound unusual. And I can’t not acknowledge the fact that it’s really uncomfortable. It sounds kind of jarring. And if people don’t know it’s coming, it’s really confusing.”

“It feels like I’m working really hard for something that doesn’t mean very much,” he said. “If I wanna say, ‘That show we played was in Duh-duh-Durham,’ and there’s five people around who don’t know I have a speech impediment, then I’m not gonna struggle through a sentence at the risk of being really embarrassed, or because of the physical discomfort of talking,” he said. “People who don’t stutter don’t understand how much strategy is involved, and how much, like, self-preservation there is.”

“I 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. I would, you know, like, I don’t know—I would make five-hour-long Facebook Live videos where I’d just read the dictionary or some shit like that.”

“Trauma creates change you don’t choose. Healing is about creating change you do choose.”

I tell the dozens of stutterers around me, and the parents, and the therapists, that no matter how much your family loves you—and they do—they may never truly understand what it is you go through. I block, and look away, and strain to look back up. “But at some point…that has to be okay.”