by Jay
My parents loved me. But when I started stuttering as a little kid, they did what our family always did with anything painful or uncomfortable: they didn’t talk about it. I found out later they thought silence would make the problem disappear — ignore the stutter, and it doesn’t exist. We had a lot of secrets like that.
As I got older and the stutter settled in for good, their silence taught me something they never meant to teach: that I was doing something wrong every time I stuttered. I’d see the wince on their face. Every so often, when I got excited telling a story and the words came out in a tangle, one of them would snap, “Slow down. Think before you speak.” I had no idea why I talked the way I did, or how to make it stop.
One afternoon I ended up somewhere that felt like a doctor’s office. Nobody explained what was happening. I was just a kid sitting across from a stranger who had me read out loud from a book. Every time I stuttered, she told me to change how I talked so people wouldn’t notice. She and my parents called these tricks my “tools.” After that, whenever I stuttered, someone would remind me to “use my tools.” What I actually heard was: stop stuttering. That’s when I learned to hide.
Hiding took enormous effort. I had to plan out everything I was going to say before I said it. If I knew I’d stutter on a word, I’d swap it for another one — or just leave that part out entirely. A lot of the time I just stayed quiet. The worst moments were the ones I couldn’t prepare for: an unexpected question, reading aloud in class, someone asking my name. I’d stutter in a way that felt violent and humiliating, and I’d spend the rest of the day feeling sorry for having “inflicted” it on whoever was listening.
At my sessions with the “doctor,” I learned that if I could avoid stuttering in front of her, she was pleased. If I could hide it from my parents, they were pleased too. So the lesson landed clearly: hiding my stutter was good.
By adulthood, I’d gotten very good at it. We call this being “covert.” I knew exactly which words I could say safely. I controlled who I talked to and what situations I put myself in. I built hundreds of tricks to avoid stuttering — but those tricks made my speech a mess. Weird pauses. Odd verbal tics. Sentences that didn’t quite hold together, because I was constantly rerouting around words I couldn’t say. I wasn’t stuttering anymore, but I also wasn’t making sense. I’d walk away from conversations feeling empty, because I hadn’t actually connected with anyone. I’d stopped stuttering. I’d also stopped communicating.
By middle age, the toll of living that way caught up with me. I’d spent so long dodging and hiding that I simply ran out of runway. I needed help.
When I met Vivian, she asked me how I felt about stuttering. No one had ever asked me that. I didn’t have an answer — I didn’t understand stuttering at all, or why it happened to me. I just knew, on some level, that it was wrong. I couldn’t even have called myself “a stutterer” at that point.
She invited me to a Saturday group: a circle of people who stuttered, openly and often. At first I felt embarrassed for them. Then I found myself mesmerized — they had no shame about it, no self-consciousness. They stuttered, they communicated, and nobody in the room cared. Watching them, I learned what courage actually looked like. That community changed everything.
Slowly, with Vivian’s help, I learned to stutter openly as an adult. She taught me to become my own speech therapist. I learned the difference between stuttering and struggling — that a stutter, on its own, is usually just a small, gentle break in speech, not the catastrophe I’d built it up to be. It was the first time I actually heard my own voice for what it was. I discovered that if my stuttering didn’t bother me, it usually didn’t bother the person listening. And even when it did bother someone — that was okay too. It didn’t have to matter. I was a person who stuttered. That was simply true, and it was fine.
If I could go back and talk to my parents, here’s what I’d tell them: be curious, not silent. Ask me how I feel about stuttering. Help me find other kids who stutter. Introduce me to adults who stutter and are doing well — so I could see, early on, that a full and happy life doesn’t require hiding who I am.