No Epiphanies

Testing the water
To see if it is too hot
Better yet, jump in!
The other day I was at a meeting at work. It involved a speaker standing in front of a group of about twenty people and giving a presentation. The speaker stumbled over his words quite frequently. There were a number of times he suddenly seemed unsure and had some repetitions. More than once he had to back track and start a sentence over because he got mixed up in the middle of it. Through all of this though, I'm confident that no one in the audience thought that he had a speech problem. At worst they may have thought he wasn't prepared enough or was too nervous or wasn't as familiar with the materials as he should have been.

Over the past year or so I've enjoyed noticing people's speech - more specifically, the imperfections in their speech. But the one difference between all of their speech and mine is that their imperfections are deemed normal and mine are not. Facial tension, closed eyes, and jaw jerks don't fall into most people's idea of normal speech. My goal is to get my speech to the point where, even if the number of them is above average, the disfluencies are normal. I think that my biggest hurdle is that years ago, when I first started stuttering, the things I tried very hard not to do were things that were normal disfluencies, things like repetitions. Because I feared those normal speech mistakes so much, I would not allow myself to produce them and instead replaced them with very abnormal looking and sounding tension. I realize that my fear is very much irrational in that everyone makes speech mistakes and virtually no one cares.

So to recap - I pay attention to people's speech errors and realize how common they are. I know my fear of these normal mistakes is completely irrational. I know all this. I know that it's good that I know all this. I know that me knowing all this is a step in the right direction. I get told that it's great that I have these realizations and it's great that I can talk about it and that I'm good at seeing what's going on with myself. I like the kind words, but all the praise and all the personal realizations don't change the way I speak. So where is my goddamned light bulb moment? I know, I know, it’s not that simple. Maybe the answer is simply that even if I get it all figured out and all the emotional speech baggage is removed, I still need to contend with well over two decades worth of tense speech habits.

Why Therapy?

The hope of others
Resides as a driving force
Pushed by their requests
This simple question is really a multitude of queries all rolled into one. Do I care enough about my stutter to spend the time and effort on therapy? Do the struggles I have with producing speech negatively affect my life enough to spend the time and effort? Do I honestly believe that any type of therapy will produce an outcome that is improved enough from how my speech currently is to allow me to be happy with it? If I believe that, do I honestly believe that I possess the gumption and motivation to do the type of therapy I’ll need to do to achieve that end? Yeah, these questions ain’t all gettin’ answered tonight.

Stuttering certainly does negatively affect my life. It causes me extreme frustrations at times. It makes me think about and notice my speech every time I talk. I dwell on it prior to, during, and after speaking. I feel good when I don’t struggle and not so good when I do (“not so good” can vary from “not a big deal” to “super duper shitty”, depending on who I’m talking to, what the situation is, how bad my tension is, etc). That being said - Has my speech problem held me back in life? In the grand scheme of things, no, I don’t think so, but on the small scale it has because there are times I don’t say everything I want to say or cut myself short because it’s easier than fighting. Well, I think that sort of answers one of the questions.

The bottom line right now is this: I like going to my speech therapy. I’m not always sure that what I’m doing is going to have any positive, long term effects, but I’m not sure that it won’t, so I’m fine with it.