Throughout my academic career, I would often spend the night before the first day of school lying in bed staring at the ceiling with clammy hands, a dry mouth and nervous stomach, absolutely horrified of what was going to transpire the next day.
Why? I knew that, like clockwork, each teacher would inevitably utter the dreaded phrase, “Let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves.”
Most people think nothing of such common occurrences. Yet, when I had the floor, the audience observed something a little unusual. My eyes closed, my jaw clinched and my foot inexplicably jerked and tapped. My face contorted and blood rushed to my cheeks. The words came out one painfully slow syllable at a time.
Let me explain. Roughly 3 million Americans stutter — and I happen to be one of them. More specifically, I have been diagnosed — several times since childhood (as if I needed reminding) — as a severe stutterer.
Thus, I feel as qualified as anyone to talk about National Stuttering Awareness Week. It’s like spring break, but slightly less fun and without the beach.
It seems to me that stuttering, as a disorder, gets little media attention. Admittedly, there are more pressing issues in the medical community — stuttering isn’t fatal, physically debilitating or painful. It does, however, have many social effects that the general populace often doesn’t realize and, at the very least, stuttering deserves at least as much attention as is paid to other — ahem — disorders that inundate prime time television with advertisements of various “enhancements.”
The social effects of stuttering can be broad, deep and, in many ways, debilitating. Stuttering affects virtually all aspects of speech, including casual conversation. Simple things such as ordering food, making phone calls, even social settings such as parties or networking events can be enormously stressful and nerve-racking.
For many stutterers, myself included, there is a constant dilemma being waged in our minds: Do I order the chicken or the fish? I may want the chicken, but fish is easier to say. Do I defend my ideas at the board meeting, or smile and acquiesce? Do I approach the girl standing alone at the party? I would, but odds are she would want to know my name and I’m just not ready for that kind of commitment.
The dearth of public knowledge also begets several myths about stuttering that warrant quelling. First and foremost, stuttering does not indicate any sort of mental disability in the speaker. Stutterers are every bit as intelligent as fluent speakers. Nor is stuttering something children necessarily outgrow. Most children who stutter will not stutter into adulthood, but many will. I’ve been trying to outgrow my stuttering for roughly 23 years now. It’s a safe bet to assume that it’ll be around for 23 more.
Perhaps the most pervasive myth about stuttering, particularly within the stuttering community, is that a stutterer can only be successful after he can speak fluently. Bruce Willis, James Earl Jones and Sen. Joseph Biden are frequently cited as some of the “recovered” stutterers that went on to great careers after overcoming their stuttering. But the idea that stutterers must learn to speak fluently in order to be successful is horribly inaccurate. Being a stutterer is indeed a challenge, but not a professional death sentence.
There are incredibly talented attorneys, artists, musicians, diplomats, activists, professors, engineers, entrepreneurs, etc. who have plenty to contribute to our respective fields — we just happen to stutter. Stuttering is a hurdle, but not a barrier to success.
Certainly, fluent speech might make success more easily attainable — let’s not sugarcoat it. But, for various reasons, success never comes easy to anyone — even us.
A lifelong stutterer and a member of the D.C. Chapter of the National Stuttering Association, Charles Repine is an editorial assistant at The Examiner and a fellow at the Collegiate Network.
