5 Things I Wish My Younger Self Knew About Stuttering

When I was growing up as a kid who stuttered, I felt so isolated. I didn’t know anybody else who talked like me, and no one ever talked about my stuttering. My father would yell at me when I stuttered, which made me feel scared and ashamed. When I started school, I remember my kindergarten teacher also reprimanding me for the way I talked, which again made me feel so
ashamed.

I got teased a lot for my stuttering. Kids mimicked me and laughed and I began to not want to talk at all, because of the reactions I got and the feelings I had. It was a very lonely experience growing up thinking I was the only person who talked like this. I felt weird and awkward and like somehow
stuttering was my fault.

I worried about stuttering all the time and constantly figured out ways to not stutter openly. I developed a huge vocabulary as a kid, and became an expert at substituting words that I knew I would stutter on with words that were safer to say. And I also avoided speaking situations a lot.
Sometimes it was just easier not to talk – then it was guaranteed that I wouldn’t stutter.

As I got older, things changed. Dealing with stuttering became a little easier, because I learned to not care so much about what other people thought. And I met other people who stutter, which changed my life dramatically. I realized I wasn’t the only one and there was no need for me to feel so weird and awkward anymore.

These are the things I know now about stuttering that I would have liked to know when I was younger.

1. Stuttering is no one’s fault. It is a speech disorder that interferes with the normal flow of speech production. It is widely thought today that stuttering is neurological and also genetic. No one in my immediate or extended family stutters, but it definitely wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything to cause my stutter, and neither did my parents.

2. When you get older, stuttering is easier to deal with. It’s a bigger deal in our heads than it really is to other people. Adults have their own issues – they don’t care that someone else stutters.

3. Stuttering does not mean that we are less intelligent than others or that we have emotional problems. We are not nervous or shy. We just stutter. We’re as smart as anyone else and can do anything that anyone else can.

4. There are lots of people who stutter. In fact, there is a whole community of people who stutter, from all walks of life. People who stutter are very successful and have careers as lawyers, doctors, educators and many more. When I was growing up, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to get a good job just because of the way I speak. That’s just not true.

5. Stuttering make us unique. Only 1 percent of the general population stutters, which means I have something that 99 percent of the world doesn’t have. And that’s kind of cool.

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