“I wish I had a stutter like yours”
Comparison is the theft of joy…is the phrase?
You know I’ve probably compared every detail of myself to someone else I’ve encountered in my life. Haven’t we all? I would have never thought I would compare my stutter to someone else until now.
If you’ve missed my stuttering journey, one TDLR portion is that I did not encounter another person who stuttered for at least a decade (unless they were as covert as me). Now while I don’t think I was the most covert person on the block I thought my stutter was mild to lightly moderate. That was not until I met the other young adults at the National Stuttering Association.
We were a group of four, including myself. Just as quickly as I was introduced into the world of *PWS I just as quickly assessed the severity of the others' stutter and how they stuttered. What secondary tics they have, were they being covert, were they using fluency techniques? I scored myself smack in the middle between them. I wasn’t mild but I also wasn’t severe.
But what kept me up at night was visualizing myself with their stutter and thinking, “If this is how they stutter all the time, I wonder if they experience the same struggles I do?” I know that’s dumb, but the micro shifts of the different stutters could change how society perceives them. To me, it is in the same way that colorism does, or pretty privilege.
It wasn’t until I started my job a year ago that I truly said those words out loud…to myself.
The first week, as part of my onboarding, I met the director of another department. Immediately I clocked his stutter. He elongated his consonance and vowels when he stuttered instead of it being broken and choppy like mine. He made eye contact. I either closed my eyes entirely or blinked furiously. He also exuded confidence. I couldn’t see a wave of insecurity slip after each word that wasn’t fluent. I can’t say it doesn’t shake my confidence, even in the best of times.
I had someone new in my life confess to me, because they didn’t know I had a stutter, that it looked like I could have Tourette's. First time someone has told me that but probably not the only one in my life who thought of it.
It’s moments like those when I imagine stuttering the way that the people I met at NSA, or my coworker- where the question of what is happening might be a passing thought, instead of being jolted by the shift in body behavior. How the other person’s comfort may be found in your confidence. Perhaps it eases the tension or gives a gateway to ask questions.
The paramount projection of all this comes back to the desire to stutter less, but the finite is the yearning that if I were to stutter, it could be perceived closer to a fluent speech pattern like them rather than being so quickly “othered.”
When I finally found the courage to talk to the director more than a year later, I asked him about his stutter. At the end he told me that he’s looking to go back to speech therapy because in this stretch of his stuttering journey, he believes it is getting worse.
And just like that I was reminded how subjective our perceptions are of ourselves. What I thought was his best, what I was longing for, was something that was at his worst. As people who stutter, we all struggle.
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*PWS: People Who Stutter
