Although I experienced a number of challenges as a student over the years, I would like to share with you about a longer term struggle: I’d like to tell you about my life as a stutterer.
In the second grade, I first noticed that I was beginning to have difficulty saying certain words. Once while I was reading aloud in class, I was unable to say the word “magician.” I simply could not put the sounds together to make the word come out of my mouth.
As the years passed, the problem became more evident. There were many words and sounds that I struggled to articulate, and there were many situations where I felt embarrassed, even humiliated.
Once in a worship service in church while I was in high school, I couldn’t make it through the Bible passage that I was supposed to be reading to the congregation. I simply had to sit down without finishing, because I couldn’t get the words out.
There was the time in high school when, as president of the Spanish Honor Society, I was supposed to lead the assembly in the entire program in Spanish. My halting, discontinuous reading nearly paralyzed me.
And there were the times in college that my friends would mimic the fact that I sometimes moved my mouth but nothing came out. They thought it was funny. I didn’t.
My speaking experiences in school were not always negative. Researchers know that the majority of most stutterers’ talking time is free of stuttering, and that was—and is—certainly true for me. I always participated in class discussions, I joined the debate team in my senior year of high school, and I took a public speaking course in college. I was modestly successful in all of these things, but my inability to get out the words that I wanted to use always held me back.
You see, stutterers often avoid difficult words or phrases, so they substitute words that are easier to say for words or phrases that are hard to say. In short, we don’t always say what we really mean—or we use ten words to say something when we could just as easily use two or three. This is endlessly frustrating.
One of the most important decisions I ever made was to enter speech therapy. One day while in graduate school I read a story in the newspaper about the practice of a local speech therapist. As I read, I knew that I had to do something. As a general rule, stutterers hate making telephone calls, but I psyched myself up, made the call, and scheduled an appointment. I spent the next two years or so in weekly sessions with my therapist, who taught me a great deal about ways to improve my fluency.
The first and most important lesson I learned was to “go ahead”—to always attempt to say what I want to say, rather than to avoid the difficult words. All these years later, I try to keep that in mind every day, whether I am teaching a class or just having a conversation. One of the other important lessons I learned was that I need to be up front about the problem, and for many years now I have told my students on the first day of classes that I am a stutterer. It helps to get it out in the open.
Ironically, I am sometimes told that I am a compelling speaker. The intermittent pauses and struggling intensity in my speaking, I suspect, are often interpreted as flowing from the great passion that I have for the subjects that I teach. My speech impediment, in an odd sort of way, has made me a better speaker.
As a rule, I never turn down an opportunity to speak in public. I want to accept the challenge rather than give in to the fear. A few years ago, I even had the opportunity to give a speech in the courtroom of the United States Supreme Court. Such events have helped me, as my therapist urged, to “build a positive speech history” for myself.
Still, I know that I will never give a perfect speech, and I will never be “cured” of my stuttering. Instead, I set a goal for myself each day to simply “go ahead.”
Timothy S. Huebner, History