Multiply, Dilute

Love is limitless. You can love two people or two hundred and you still have the same amount to give. Multiplying something like love doesn't dilute it. Other things, quantifiable things, don't have that characteristic.

We have a limited amount of time. Much of that is already accounted for, in one way or another: a job, parental responsibilities, household chores, socializing with friends, watching reality TV. The time we have left is our free time. That time can be filled with as many things as a person can think of or used to focus on a very few. Multiplying the amount of things we choose to focus our time on certainly does dilute all of them. Individual projects take longer to finish. Excuses allow things to get pushed aside one more time, perpetually.

If we multiply the things we do during the small amount of time we have left over, the quality of time spent on each will decrease and none will be done up to their potential or ever get finished. Our experiences become diluted and the tasks become aimed in the direction of meaninglessness.

From a practicality standpoint:
Choose one thing to focus on during the short bursts of available time. Focus on it.

The Choices that Make Us Human

One of the things that makes us human is our freedom to choose. When faced with a situation, we have the ability to rise above our base instinctual reactions and make a conscious choice in response to that situation.

If we make the same choice in the same situation time and again, a habit forms. Most often we think of this in terms of bad habits rather than focusing on the good that can come from habits. Habits are seen as locking a person into a routine with no way out. And while that's pretty much what a habit is, that certainly doesn't have to be a bad thing.

If a positive habit is created, the same rigidity that people fight against when trying to break bad habits will still be there, but instead of hindering you, it can help set you free. Having that automatic reaction to complete a task leads to more unburdened free time. Positive habits can take certain activities and effortlessly vault them over the excuses and move straight to getting things done. You won't have to spend energy avoiding things. Positive habits can help you to focus on what's really important while not having a list of little "shoulds" on your mind to clog up the works.

I had this blog post started a number of weeks ago and came back to it multiple times and pecked at it a bit each time. Nothing jumped out at me enough to be able to finish it. I looked back over it again this past week and realized that it coincided surprisingly well with a major theme from the novel I had just finished reading: A Clockwork Orange. A question presented in the book is: Are we still human if we have been deprived of our ability to choose to do right or wrong?

I've only touched on the specifics of what the habits are that I'm attempting to form or change. I'll expand on that more another time.

I'll go the same route as last time and end with a link to a few of my thoughts on Anthony Burgess', A Clockwork Orange.

What's it going to be then, eh?

The question that makes the title of this post is used throughout Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. Each time it's asked, the main character, Alex, is being presented with a choice. Sometimes seemingly mundane, but always leading to whether or not he's going to continue his life of violence and crime or...not.

The theme of choice and particularly choosing to do good or bad, is raised throughout the book. The question is actually asked outright in the book: If someone only can do good through compulsion, that is, without really having a choice in the matter, are they really good? Are they really human if their ability to choose is taken away? And at what price to society?

I really enjoyed the story. As a character, Alex was engaging and interesting even if not likable. There were no other truly main characters, just people who pop in and out of Alex's life. The book is said to be dystopian, which it is, but it certainly doesn't get into details about the society as a whole. That being said, I certainly still got a feeling that the times Alex was living in were bleak and dreary. Also, because the story focused on one character and had a few prominent themes, the writing felt precise and the book was certainly not too long.

The novel is known for its heavy use of made up slang. After the first few paragraphs I wondered how many people quit reading at that point and considered it gibberish. The language was a distraction at first but it did have the effect of making you feel like you were in a completely different place. It also forced you to concentrate down to the word level while reading. And it was an interesting exercise to realize how quickly person can adapt to different terminology. Within a few pages certain words were understood and their meanings incorporated into the sentences without too much extra thought.

One thing I noticed is that the language seemed to blunt the effect of the ultra-violent scenes. When my brain had to process a little bit longer to say, "Ok, that word means blood, and that one means face..." the picture then didn't pop up as clearly in my mind. Whether the fact that the violence didn't always come across as horrendous as it was, was a good thing or not, I'm not sure.

The last chapter was originally omitted from the American publications of the novel. The publishers had their reasons and my feelings are that it should have been published as a whole from the beginning. If someone doesn't like the work of an artist, they can make a derivative work or an abridged version, but it should not be recreated with parts missing and still titled with the original name. That being said, I was a little dismayed when I finished the book and realized that I didn't particularly care for the last chapter. I really wanted to be able to love the real ending so that I could internally sneer at those publishers.

Alex goes through a change in the last chapter and it seemed too contrived. All throughout the story, Alex pushes the blame for his problems out to others. Time and again when he was responsible (sometimes solely so) he finds a way to rationalize his situation to be other people's fault. He blames his friends, his parents, the government, the police. Granted, there was some blame to be spread around, but Alex pushed it all off.

It was hard to buy into the idea that a person can go from raping and murdering his way through his teenage years to suddenly discover around age twenty that he just wasn't into it anymore.

So rather than a sudden change from ultra-violent to non-violent, I would have liked Alex to suddenly realize the negative affect he had on people's lives. Once he came to that realization, then he would have made a choice to stop being violent. Instead, he just grew out of it without learning anything or really making a choice; he just didn't feel like causing violence anymore.

But I'll still take the real ending with my complaints over the trimmed story for the sake of hoping to sell more copies.

Reading for Writing

I used to read voraciously. Over the past several years my reading has dwindled to a handful of websites, blurbs from the newspaper, and rarely a novel. I can point to having kids as a reason this has happened and there would certainly be some truth to that, but that's not the whole story.

I've read comments from any number of people (people in a position to know) that say that one of the biggest components of being a writer is reading. (Some have even suggested that a writer ought to spend half his time reading and half writing.) You read to see another writer's style, how they handle certain situations. You read your favorite genre and your least favorite. You read to research, research, research, to keep up on current events, and to expand your general knowledge.

I always feel that I need a good chunk of time before sitting down and writing, and those chunks of time can be few and far between. Reading, on the other hand, fits into those smaller windows; it's much easier to pick up and put down something you're consuming than it is something you're creating. And since reading is essential for writing, by squeezing in some word consumption at various intervals throughout the day, I'm helping move the grand goal forward.

Awhile ago I renewed my subscription to National Geographic. I read it cover to cover every month. The variety of topics discussed always develop into an idea or two for a story, which I then make sure to throw into an electronic document so that more thought can be put into it at some yet-to-be-determined date. So I've at least had that going for me.

A few weeks ago I picked up a novel that I had some interest in reading ever since my wife told me I might like it after she had read it for her book club. I think part of me was afraid to read fiction because I might realize the stuff I write is complete garbage compared to a real author's work (and therein is the "whole story" as mentioned from the first paragraph). Well I did start it and I purposely picked it up during free minutes here and there and during my lunch break at work. This felt good because I was working on polishing two habits at once: better use of those random free moments and reading for writing.

I also thought it might be worthwhile to share my feelings about the book I read, Life of Pi. Here is my review of the novel.

A Story that will Make You Believe in God

This review of Life of Pi will contain some spoilers. Not huge plot details, but enough generalities to give away some important parts. You've been warned.

Overall, I really liked the book, but since I can always find something to complain about, I will.

The book started with a note from the author. Right away I was confused. I knew Life of Pi was fiction, but the author's note was written like it was a true story. This wouldn't be a problem if it was stated to be written by someone else other than Yann Martel, the author, but since I was led to believe the note was written by Mr. Martel, I was confused.

From early on, it's apparent that Pi survives his ordeals. It's stated that the story has a "happy ending" and since the premise is that Pi himself has related his story to the author, he obviously doesn't get killed during the telling of his tale. There were plenty of times of great suspense during the novel where wild animals are pitted in close proximity to Pi and the young man has to use the very few resources around him in order to survive. I found myself feeling tense and nervous during these chapters (and loving it), but not as much as I could have since I knew all would be well in the end.

A few times throughout the novel I caught myself thinking that Martel was presenting a lot of interesting information, but it almost felt like he was just informing the reader of said information rather than moving the story forward. It reminded me of Herman Melville's long chapters about everything cetacean in Moby Dick. I will admit that Martel's informative musings were more interesting to me than Melville's, but that could simply be because of the difference 150 years has on what an audience finds more interesting: the body types of whales or all things to do with surviving months at sea. When I later read that Martel extensively researched a number of different topics for Life of Pi, I wondered if he just couldn't resist regurgitating every interesting thing he had learned rather than tying it all tightly into the narrative.

A few criticisms aside, I really enjoyed the book. It was a great story that moved deftly from moments of action and suspense to moving imagery of life, death, religion, and survival.

The book takes an interesting twist near the end that really shakes things up and almost makes a person want to start reading the book over from the beginning right away to see how it comes across with this new knowledge. This was the first time I really thought about the claim made by a fictional person in the author's note that Pi's tale is, "A story that will make you believe in God." I had initially scoffed at such a claim as just being something to say to try to pull the reader in. After reading the last part of the novel, I realized it didn't mean it was going to actually change a person's belief in God, but rather it was making a statement about the very nature of a faithful belief.

The first part of the book is heavy with Pi's love of three major religions. He angers some people in his life because he doesn't choose one religion, but finds things he loves about all of them and so embraces them all. And just like Pi chose certain parts that made sense to him, moved him, helped him to explain life, so too must the reader choose which of the two stories we're to believe. Do you believe the good story or the ugly story? But there's more to it - the good story has parts that are too fanciful to be realistic. So, to believe the good story, you also must be able to explain those fantastic aspects by attributing them to an intervention of a higher power.

And I think that was the author's point on religion: We want to believe the "good story", so we find a way to believe, even if that means relying on something not based on hard evidenced facts, but on faith.

Sleep

I stay up too late. I've decided that this is the cornerstone of my bad habits, the one that, if picked away at enough so that it crumbles, it will make all subsequent knocking down of other bad habits easier while simultaneously making the building of positive habits that much easier. Lack of sleep can have a whole pile of negative side effects. Cranky moods. Lethargy. Messed up metabolism. Foggy thinking. Really, pretty much anything a person wants to accomplish is more difficult if that person is sleep deprived.

I had realized that this was a problem for me years ago but any attempt to adjust my sleep schedule would never last very long. Each week and each night I had intentions of going to bed earlier, but it seldom happened. When it did happen, it wasn't because I had finally conquered my inner anti-sleep demon, it was because it was the end of the week and I was exhausted.

Now I'm trying it again and have been doing really well for the past week. Why will it work now when it hasn't in the past? Not sure. Maybe it's because I'm looking at it as a means to an end. I'm not doing it to simply get more sleep, I'm doing it to make it possible to fulfill other goals later.

...And Breathe.

Am I really posting on this blog again after nearly two years of silence? You bet your ass I am.

But Torey, you might say, if you haven't had anything to say in this long about your stuttering, what could you possibly add now?

Good question, and thanks for asking it, friend! The answer is, I still might not write about stuttering all that much, but that doesn't mean that this little slice of the internet can't be refocused on something else while retaining its original long-term plans. More about those continued long-term plans later.

Whenever I think about myself - who I really am, who I want to be, experiences I've gone through that have changed me in little or large ways - I've realized that my speech doesn't factor in to the picture my mind paints. When my mind wanders, which is frequently, and it's jumping from my daily stresses to my dreams, it's never about stuttering. Furthermore, if I chose one thing to change about myself, I can say with certainty it would not have anything to do with speech production.

So all that being said, is it any wonder why my blog posts here slowly spread themselves out until pretty soon I was approaching a two-year hiatus? How can a person expect to write on a regular basis about something that isn't that important to them?

I started this blog on a day that doesn't happen very often and with a quote that fit the narrowed focus of the blog, but that quote is still equally as relevant to the new widened focus. See the quote here.

The original idea was to have a slow and steady change to my speech from where I was at point A, to where I wanted to be at point B. I'm keeping the idea the same, but expanding it from "speech" to "my life." But I've actually pulled back even a bit more than that to focus on the processes of getting to where ever it is I might want to end up in my life (I say "where ever" like it's unknown, but it's really not).

The processes that I will focus on will be habits, fears, and motivation. If I make the changes and realizations in the right direction, I'm expecting this to help in all aspects of my life, speech included. That being said, the grand goal of all of this is to get to the point where I regularly do some writing, of the fictional type. I'm aiming to shield my eyes from those bright lights, squint a little, and be happy with what I see beyond.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Secondary Behaviors

This is a follow up to the plan outlined in the previous post.

With the help of my clinician we created a video tape of us having a conversation. Upon watching it I felt two things: disappointment and embarrassment. The disappointment was because there wasn't a lot of physical struggling, the kind that I feel every time I speak for more than a few seconds. I was expecting to feel uncomfortable about watching myself talk, but something else was apparent immediately that I wasn't expecting: I was using a whole heap of interjections. Long strings of "ums" and more individual ones thrown in between words. What bothered me about it, even more than the struggling that I had been looking for, was that, at times, it took away from the coherence of what I was saying. I've always been afraid of that and hear it was, right before my eyes and ears.

So we talked about what to do next. Where do we go from here? One option was to make another recording. I told my clinician that since the ultimate goal of this summer project was to get me to be able to accurately practice my physical secondary behaviors, why not just have me give it a shot, instead of talking and worrying over the tape? I felt that, if allowed to, I would talk around it all day until July came to a close and then I would never have given it a real shot. The part of me that was scared of trying this really wanted that to happen. With my feelings out in the open, we decided that during our next session together, I would just try to voluntarily create some struggling and see where it went. I knew this wouldn't be easy and I wasn't sure if I would be able to make myself do it. Luckily, while walking back to my office after the session, I had an idea for a way to allow myself to get warmed up to the thought of going through with this. And since there was a stuttering group the next night, I had the perfect opportunity to try it out.

The group meeting was lightly attended. It was Jerry, an SLP named J, and a communicative disorders college student named E. I liked being the only person there with a speech problem because it meant I pretty much had a two-hour 3-on-1 therapy session. Selfish, but true. So I presented my idea, knowing that they really couldn't say no to the stutterer at a stuttering group. I had thought up a game that, if all went according to plan, would help to ease me into the practice of voluntarily fucking up my face to match how I uncontrollably fuck up my face all the time. The rules are simple: One person makes a goofy face and then the other people have to all make the same face. Then the next person gets to make a stupid face of their choice while the others get to mimic. The faces can involve some movement and sounds if desired. My plan was that after a few back-and-forths, that I would already be feeling pretty silly about making childish faces, so I wouldn't feel that much sillier jerking my jaw a little to try to simulate what I do while speaking. Aside from me needing to explain the rules several times to Jerry, it went quite well. I felt that there was just the right amount of easing in mixed with a dash of secondary behavior. It produced a number of laughs too.

So the next day at therapy, my clinician and I played the game too. It worked to the extent that it could. I was glad that I gave it a shot and took the initiative to come up with something that would help me try to voluntarily create those behaviors, but it was clear to me that I needed something visual to go off of.

Also, sometime after watching the recording, I had thought a lot about those nasty interjections that I saw and so utterly despised. I came to the conclusion that I've been using them to cover up the physical struggling I'm prone to do. I had undoubtedly used so many of them while having myself taped because I subconsciously didn't want to see myself struggling on the TV. After coming to this realization I noticed that I began to pay more attention to the interjections I was using in my everyday speech and there were times when I really over used them, again, to the point of where I was afraid of causing incoherence. This all gets neatly tied together when we decided to try some casual conversations during my therapy. I immediately liked the results. I was really noticing all the interjections and able to remove a large number of them. And since I was using those "ums" as a way to get myself unstuck or to avoid getting stuck, the outcome of me removing so many of them was that I showed many more instances of physical secondary behaviors – the struggling that we tried and failed to capture during the first taping. So the plan was obvious: Make another recording while having me concentrate on banishing as many of the dastardly "ums" as possible.

We created another recording under the above stated specifications and I really liked results. While it wasn't comfortable watching myself, I didn't feel embarrassed by it either and it showed a significantly higher number of struggling instances than the first one. That's where we sit right now. The next step is to transfer the recording to a digital format so that I can watch it more on my own and see what I think of it and to get comfortable with seeing myself do those things.

And it's out of context in regards to how it's said in the song, but I relate these lines to making a decision to break old habits and to form new habits.

Drive until you lose the road
Or break with the ones you've followed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmFi2snLr7o

I want to be like Mike

I hope he doesn't mind me talking about him and I hope he corrects any incorrect characterizations I might have made.

Mike is a friend of mine. Mike is an SLP. Mike is a stutterer. Mike is a former stutterer. When Mike talks about speech, he does so like no one else I've heard before. This is true because he speaks from his own experience coping, struggling, overcoming, anguishing, surviving, helping, learning, teaching. I don't always understand the importance or the depth of what I'm hearing, but I listen and try to absorb as much as possible because as different as we are, we're the same in the ways that matter for the topic of stuttering. Mike is the one that affected me profoundly with a single sentence, as chronicled here. Mike used to stutter. And by that, I don't mean some nice, simple repetitions, I mean the whole facial tension, twisting of the head type of stuttering. I know this because he's not only talked about it, he shows people exactly what he used to do. He can demonstrate his struggling whenever he wants to. He is exerting control over his speech by making mistakes at the time of his choosing.

I'm at a point in my therapy where it's great because I'm aware of blah blah blah. I realize my irrational fears, my idiosyncrasies, blah blah blah. I've also realized that I'm at a point where I'm comfortable. Being comfortable isn't a bad thing, but if I stay in that cozy spot and never push myself beyond it, then this is as far as I'm going to get.

A month or so ago, I talked to Mike on the phone for awhile. He explained that one of biggest positive steps he took in his therapy was confronting his struggling. He did this by being able to mimic at will his worst secondary behaviors. He suggested I do the same thing. His idea was this: Get a recording of me that shows a range of my worst struggling. Watch that recording over and over so that I become desensitized to seeing myself doing those abnormal things that I do everyday. Take note of what I don't like the most about it and practice doing those things so that I can eventually do them whenever I want. The point of it would be for me to able to have total control over my speech, so that I know I can act out those struggles when I want to. It's a way of confronting a fear and coming to a better understanding of my speech.

Right now I'm actually more nervous about properly producing the recording of my struggling than I am of trying to bring myself to voluntarily repeat those struggles. I'm afraid that there will be technical problems (we'll be recording to tape and since I don't own a VCR, we're going to try to transfer it to a digital format). I'm afraid that I (or my clinician) won't feel that what we recorded is a very good show of the worst of my worst. My fears are being a little magnified because I only have about seven weeks left to work with my current clinician and I want to get this recording right the first time so that we can spend as much time as a possible on the real meat of the task. I decided to write about this right now because we're going to be going at this for the first time on Thursday. Talking about it beforehand ensures that it's out there, i.e. I can't back out as easily if it really sucks.

But really, how bad can it be? All I'm trying to do is force myself to do something voluntarily that I do all the time anyway.

Hypothetically Hypocritical

Slow down! Take a deep breath! Calm down!

These three things are often said to someone, in particular a child, who is starting to repeat their words. The person offering the ill-advised advice is often a well-meaning parent or teacher. The advice is so profoundly wrong because the child is probably doing something, developmentally, completely normal, but that child is now slowly coming to the conclusion that they are doing something terribly wrong and that it needs to be corrected. Overcompensation, internalizing, and fear lead to real problems, like stuttering or the worst outcome – silence. My speech problem, while not due to being told those three exclamatory utterances, is a product of internalizing fear and keeping that fear tightly tangled together with my speech.

Someone talking too fast doesn't cause stuttering. Someone not breathing enough during their speech doesn't cause stuttering. Someone being overly excited about the topic they're talking about doesn't cause stuttering. Others may not know this, but I do.

Now, to the point! I enjoy the fact that I'm now much more conscious of many more aspects of my speech while I'm speaking and it's opened my eyes to some interesting things. But despite my strong words in the preceding paragraphs, I find myself thinking I really need to just slow down, breath more during speech, and calm the hell down. And then I wonder how big of a hypocrite that makes me.

So in the context of therapy it's like this – Do I work those three things in somehow? Do I ignore them and just deal with things much more underlying? Talking fast, being over-excited while speaking, and talking until you're out of breath can certainly cause anyone to stumble on their words and I know those things sometimes help send me into struggling mode. But the difference between me and others is that even if all three of those factors are absent, I'll still struggle. So is improving in those three areas worth it because it could allow me to strip down my speech to something easier to work with or is it just a waste of time and setting myself up for disappointment?

In any case, it's a good thing that I'm acknowledging this. Go me!

And lastly, I've been listening to this lovely song a lot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QotZ7TIaztw
(It doesn't have anything to do with faulty speech production.)

At Least I Didn't Wait a Full Three Months

My motivation for finally getting something posted here was several people actually telling me that they've been looking every once in awhile and there hasn't been any updates. Thanks for the little shove.

This post won't make total sense unless you've read my previous couple of posts (and even then, I won't guarantee that it does...).

I came to a conclusion. Before I get to said conclusion, I'll recap how I reached it. During the end of the summer in therapy, while I was working on the repetitions (see previous posts), my clinician called me out on something. She told me that she could guess, quite accurately, which words I was going to use a voluntary repetition on. This struck as not-so-good because it looked like I was falling into a pattern rather than just randomly choosing words.

That pattern was me subconsciously avoiding words that I could not stre-ehhhhhhhh-tch out the sound, but that, because of the nature of their sound, could only repeat them. Here, you folks at home, give this a shot: Choose a letter and make that letter's sound for several seconds. Try it with any of the following: w, r, l, n, m, y. You can keep your mouth in one position and keep making the same sound until you run out of breath (or until someone slaps you on the back of your head). Now try the same thing with some of these letters: b, d, g, t. As soon as you make the initial sound, it's done. Extending it is just some superfluous vowel sound and not the sound anymore that actually classifies it as that letter's sound. The wwwwwwater is d-d-d-down nnnnnext to the b-b-b-boat. I can do the w and n just fine but the d and b cause me to struggle.

So the conclusion that I came to through all of this is that I'm still avoiding the sounds that demand repetitions and focusing on what comes easier - prolongating the sounds instead. For Halloween, I think I'll dress up like a repetition, since there's apparently nothing more frightening.

Sometimes while reading aloud in therapy I'll try to use repetitions on all the b words just because for some reason the bah-bah-bah sound is much harder for me to do. It frequently doesn't work out as planned and I'll kind of freeze up on the sound, but sometimes it goes just fine. I have no idea why. Also, I must say, whoever thinks it's a good idea to put two b words in a row can go straight to hell, the barbaric bastards.

Something W-w-w-icked This Way Comes

This post ties in well with this one.

Because it's done at a university, a year of therapy for me consists of three different periods of time - Fall semester, Spring Semester, and June and July during the Summer session. During this past Spring Semester, for the first time, I started really playing a more direct role in making changes to my therapy. I've always had a say, and I've always been ok with what we were doing, but this time we (my clinician and I) worked and we changed things based on what I said.

We worked hard at the end of Spring semester and into the Summer because I felt I was moving towards the verge of somewhere good and I needed to get the details of what we were doing hammered out before the end of the Summer. When the Fall semester starts, I'll be getting a new clinician and I wanted a therapy plan in place that I felt good about and one that was explained thoroughly enough to be clear as to what we were doing and what my goals were.

We developed a plan to talk about certain topics, topics that are important to me and/or affect me emotionally. After having a conversation about such a topic I would then talk about how I thought my anxiety level was, how I thought the setting affected me, and how much I thought I struggled throughout the conversation. The idea was that talking about these things would help us to figure out if there were any correlations to the topic, my emotional state, outside influences, etc. On top of that, it was going to be a time where I could practice talking about those hardest of subjects, feel what's going on inside me at those times (fear), figure out where it's coming from (What am I afraid of and why?), and try to change it (get rid of the fear). In my head, this was going to be the new centerpiece of my therapy and this would carry into the Fall semester with my new clinician.

Then after working on this for a few weeks, we started trying something else in therapy, besides the conversations and discussions I just mentioned. I don't remember what exactly started it, maybe it was the Dairy Queen blog post that I linked to at the start of this post, but in any case... I knew I couldn't force myself to use natural repetitions in my speech because I would subconsciously use tremendous energy to avoid them. Well instead, I gave it a shot while reading aloud to my clinician. The theory was that this would be much easier for two reasons. First, because I don't stutter much while reading - so instead of adding repetitions as well as my normal struggling, I'm just dealing with adding repetitions. Second, because of the nature of reading, I can see exactly what's coming up and periodically choose to repeat a word.

The first few times reading aloud with repetitions were very uncomfortable and I felt really stupid doing it and I also felt an irrational feeling that what I was doing was wrong. Because I felt that way, I was shocked at how fast the uncomfortable feeling subsided. I remember that at one point during one of the first readings, after it started getting easier, I got a little smirk on my face. The smirk was actually me holding back laughter. If I hadn't kept it in, it would have been the kind of laughter that is raw and emotion filled. Like when you're waiting for something really bad to happen, it doesn't happen, and then you realize it's not going to. Happiness was certainly a main proponent of the emotion, but far from the only one. Relief, a major feeling of liberation, and maybe a smidge of "This is all it took? I could have done this years ago." were all present too.

After that, the repetitions in reading had gotten much easier and so we moved to bigger and better things, i.e. a more public place. We sat in a computer lab (although not a very busy one) with me reading a news article aloud to my clinician while other people were around (although not all that close). After a few sessions of that, we modified it a bit so that after reading a short article we would then talk about the article while I continued the repetitions, i.e. trying to make a transition from the repetitions in reading, which were now easy, to the repetitions in casual conversation which I had never been able to accomplish. It was very hard to make myself incorporate repetitions into that speech, but I was able to manage to get a few.

During this time I also read aloud a few times at home to my wife. The first time, this was very uncomfortable and I read for several minutes before I was able to bring myself to toss in a repetition. The next time we did it, it wasn't so bad and I ended up reading about the exploits of Scarlett and the gang for nearly a half an hour.

Back in therapy we decided to take it a little further and walk through campus and casually talk while I would use repetitions instead of struggle, i.e. when I felt like I was going to start to fight to get words out, I would instead (in theory!) just use repetitions in place of the struggle. The first session of doing this I still struggled quite a lot and didn't do a very good job at getting the repetitions in there. The second time was much more successful and was a large improvement in the number of repetitions I was able to use while being out-and-about.

So the therapy I explained near the start of this post, with the three categories, I said I had planned on it being the new centerpiece...well now I feel even stronger that this, these repetitions are the true centerpiece that everything else must be built upon. There are a number of things I've done in therapy so far that I've felt good about at some levels, but I could not fathom how they would ever translate into positive improvements in my everyday speech. Now I've realized that many, if not all, of these things (including the "three categories" idea discussed earlier) should be re-looked at and re-evaluated later in my therapy, at a time when I would be able to properly use them to help my everyday speech. It's not that any of these things were bad or worthless, I just wasn't ready for them yet.

So the wickedness coming this way are the repetitions that I feared 20+ years ago and have since built all of my struggling speech habits on top of.

My Ears are Proud and Collision is Such an Ugly Sound

"Every minute is arranged, every moment lasts a day. Thinking about it can't help me let go, I know." -- Jim Adkins, Jimmy Eat World

So I was thinkin'...when I do these quote posts, maybe I should write up an explanation. I first thought about doing this when my clinician asked me to explain why I had chosen the last quote. After I ended up talking about it for about twenty minutes I realized I had a lot to say about it.

Like poetry, song lyrics can usually be interpreted in many different ways. Sometimes you can find meaning in just a single phrase that may mean something totally different when looked at with the other words around it or when heard by someone else. What I'm saying is, this quote is most likely taken way out of context, but really, who cares? It means something meaningful to me (even if the song has some lame "ha ha ha's" in it.).

The first part is just simply about how most people don't realize the vast amounts of pre-stuttering preparation that goes into making an eye-twitching, facial-contorting, no-sound-coming-out-while-everyone-waits, overall freakish moment not just good, but great. (That's one of those "laughing at myself on the outside and crying on the inside" type of sentences, but really, don't worry, it's more laughing than crying.)

The second part is about how I think about things all the time and analyze everything until every angle is thought about. Sometimes that's a good thing and sometimes it's just an exercise that helps me pretend like I'm getting somewhere when I'm actually not doing a damn thing. But to keep this strictly about speech production - it's good that I think about my speech and everything entailed in that, but at some point it needs to lead to action if any real changes are going to be made. And not just action, but me letting go, not caring what other people think, realizing my fears and overcoming the irrational ones. Another quote from the same song ties in well with this: "Gotta love how it's somehow all on me." I have people who are willing to help me and have put a lot of effort into helping me, but it all comes down to me (as well it should and as well it has to). That's something else I have to deal with.

The title of this post is actually a line from the song too. "Collision" is obviously my total struggle while trying to talk. While I'm obviously used to the way I talk, it's still no fun having to go through it all the time. And since I am a fan of brutal honesty, I won't cringe at calling my struggling ugly. I should just be glad it's just my ears I have to deal with and not my eyes too.

After reading through this, it may come across as negative, but fear not! I like where I am right now.

Two Stutterers and a Speech Therapist Walk into a Dairy Queen...

Time slides by quickly
Letting it pass is easy
Seizing it is hard

This month the stuttering group was lightly attended. There were three of us there: Barry* the speech therapist, Mick* the life-long stutterer, and me. We talked for awhile and then watched a short video with information and interviews about the Monster Study. After that, Barry wanted me to try something. He wanted me to try to speak more carelessly so that instead of the tension, words would come out with the normal type of repetitions that everyone makes in their speech. I’m certain that he wasn’t expecting fabulous results, but it could help to show me some examples of speaking without trying so hard. As I’ve experienced in therapy, when I start speaking with the idea of replacing tension with repetitions, no tension or repetitions come out, only normal sounding speech. I explained this to Barry, saying that when I get told to just let the repetitions happen, I usually speak just fine. Barry disagreed. He asked me if I was trying hard at times like that. I only needed a moment of thought before I said that yes, I was trying hard, very hard. He said that what I was doing was producing normal sounding speech while still struggling inside and backing myself up against a wall. We talked about that a little more and then, since there were only three of us, we headed to Dairy Queen. While there we talked some more and Mick and I tried to keep Barry from making a scene, which he probably does a lot when he’s not properly supervised (Anyone who knows Barry, knows exactly what I mean.).

It wasn’t until the next morning that I made some connections with what Barry had said the evening before. His mention of “backing myself up against a wall” was something that I had done over twenty years prior. After I had been in speech therapy as a child for awhile for non-stuttering issues, my mom had reported to my speech therapist that I was stuttering at home. The therapist blew her off and said that she was not seeing anything in the therapy so not to worry about it. What I undoubtedly was doing was trying really hard in therapy to speak without any errors. Sometime during that period I became aware of my imperfect speech and afraid of making errors, even errors that are completely normal for a six-year old and errors that no one would even really notice. Now, jump back ahead to my current (s)peachy predicament - anytime I’ve been asked to purposefully have normal repetitions it feels very uncomfortable and just plain wrong. If I’m asked to just let repetitions happen as they naturally would, I unconsciously try very hard not to have them, and back myself into that wall - the wall being the tension and secondary behaviors that I have today. I might be able to speak error-free for awhile if I try really hard, but at some point, simply trying hard won’t be good enough, which leads to trying harder with limited results, which leads to trying harder still with even worse results, etc. After awhile I’m left with facial tension, closed eyes, and the rest of the craptacularly abnormal things I do while trying to force my speech.

In summation, it is my subconscious and irrational belief that normal speech repetitions are the root of all evil. I should really get over that.

*The names have been changed to protect the innocent, or in Barry’s case, the not-so-innocent.

Unassailable

"So tell me it’s okay. Tell me anything, or show me there’s a pull, unassailable, that will lead you there, from the dark, alone, to benevolence that you’ve never known, or you knew when you were four and can’t remember. Where a small knife tears out those sloppy seams, and the silence knows what your silence means, and your metaphors (as mixed as you can make them) are linked, like days, together." -- John K. Sampson, The Weakerthans

I Want to Hear What You Have to Say

Open up your mouth
Say whatever you're thinking
Screw other people
I attend a monthly stuttering group where stutterers, parents of stutters, speech therapists, and students get together to talk about their problems, fears, and questions. At this month's meeting there was one specific speech therapist who I was particularly interested in absorbing everything I could from. He is a life-long stutterer who you would not even guess ever stuttered. He would be what any adult stutterer would look at and listen to and say "That's exactly what I want to be like." I had heard him talk at another gathering of our group many months prior. I knew that I could relate the things he said directly to me and my therapy. Not just "could relate", but "needed to relate"; our adult therapy stories were similar enough that I knew I could gain a lot from hearing his insights.

The conversation had lingered and it was almost half an hour past the scheduled ending time for the meeting. A different speech therapist had been talking about something that I had a question about that I really wanted to ask. People were shifting around and getting ready to leave. As soon as she was done talking I started to try to ask my question at the same time as the standard end-of-a-long-gathering din began, people getting up to leave, several people talking at once. The only sound I created was a fairly inaudible noise that was me trying to start my question alongside the commotion. The speech therapist had half turned and didn't see or hear me. My face was undoubtedly distorted as I tried to force my question out. And then, what happened in the next few moments, I will never forget.

"I'm listening, Torey."

I glanced up towards the person who had spoken so sincerely. The speech therapist, the one who stuttered, the one who knew exactly how I felt at that moment, was staring at me as earnestly as he had spoken. I tried again, and again was unsuccessful. Though there was no blame to be laid anywhere, the rest of the people seemed oblivious to my struggle.

He spoke again, a little bit louder, and again in all sincerity, "I want to hear what you have to say."

I got myself started and actually asked the question much easier than I would have expected. At that point I didn't really care about the question and I cared about the answer even less. No one that I remember in my life had ever said anything like that to me. Maybe it was because it didn't feel patronizing at all. "I'm listening." Maybe it was because it was being said by someone who knows what it's like, really knows, because they've lived it. "I want to hear what you have to say." Whatever the reason, it hit me hard, in a place that needed it.

After the meeting I stuck around and talked for a few more minutes with a few people, including the speech therapist who had spoken to me. I remembered exactly what he had said, but I couldn't dwell on it because I knew I would get really emotional. After leaving the building and walking through the parking lot toward home I let the two statements he had uttered slide back into my head. If I had been at home alone at that moment I would have cried for several minutes. Being that I was in a public place with some people walking around, I just let a few tears fall. After a few blocks I came upon a co-worker out walking her dog. She lives toward my house so we walked together and had a pleasant conversation. When I got home my wife told me that she had told our three year old daughter that I would come in and give her a kiss when I got home. She shares a room with our one year old son, so I went in quietly. I was not surprised to find her still awake and we spent a few minutes whispering together before I kissed her one last time and left. I then went and washed the dishes while my wife dried and we talked about a variety of mundane things. The climax of the evening was, without a doubt, hearing those two things said to me, but the rest of it means something too, even though they're everyday things that won't stay with me forever. I stuck around and talked...had a pleasant conversation...spent a few minutes whispering together...talked about a variety of mundane things...

I'm on the right track.

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.

Deep Breath...

"Some day, in years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long continued process." -- Phillips Brooks