Out of the mouth trap

This was the City Lit course for Interiorised Stammering. We were all people who had constructed our lives around avoiding the act of stuttering for the simple reason that, on a good day, we could just about manage to do so. We had just made our first out-of-the-classroom foray in the technique of voluntary stuttering.

I am ashamed to say that despite a lifetime of stuttering and avoiding stuttering, I had never looked anyone in the eyes at the crucial moment. I had spent my life fearing the disgusted reaction people must have to my stutter without ever looking to see whether it was true.

Facing my fear of public speaking

That night was a turning point. When I looked that commuter in the eyes, I also looked for the first time at my stutter itself as something I might try to understand rather than hide from. In the ten years since, stuttering has ceased to be a significant presence in both my spoken and unspoken use of language.

The reason for this is, I think, a perfect storm of elements. There is, of course, the impact of the City Lit course and the excellent speech therapists I was lucky enough to encounter. While endlessly emphasising that there is no cure for stuttering, that they could only help me change my attitude to it, they also made me fear it less, with the outcome that I did it less.

There are other, more prosaic changes that probably played a role. I was getting older, for a start. We still don’t know why conditions like stuttering often alleviate with age. It might be about acceptance, it might be about changes in the brain.

Then there was my job. I accepted an irresistible promotion that meant I couldn’t avoid public speaking any longer. Within a couple of years I was readily and regularly participating in talks, interviews and debates, often on air or in front of large groups of people.

I feared it dreadfully at first, neurotically preparing and over-preparing for days, but you can only maintain that level of fear, with the requisite preparation time to compensate, for so long. I learned to speak impromptu. I found that along with the fear was a seed of pleasure that flowered and grew with each event until the anxiety and enjoyment complemented one another.

While I still block on words much more when public speaking (and, I should add in self-admonishment, still resort to the sort of word substitution I am trying to avoid), it generally doesn’t prevent me from saying what I have to say.

My fluency also increased through researching ‘Words Fail Us’. I became fascinated by those, like Lewis Carroll, Edwyn Collins and Jess Thom, who found a creative outlet for their speech conditions. I felt proud to be associated with what I increasingly saw as a historical and cultural tribe: people with a fundamentally different experience of language going back as far as records allow.

Most of all, I found myself deeply moved and inspired by the bravery of those I met: people for whom every sentence was imbued with disordered speech, who in the process of coming out had wrestled with appalling self-loathing, real rather than perceived social discrimination, and who, in some cases, even considered suicide. My own experience of stuttering, mostly interiorised, felt petty in comparison.

I am particularly inspired by the younger generation who, still in their teens or in their twenties, openly identify as people with speech disorders and manage to recognise and celebrate the distinctiveness of their speech while also acknowledging the pain it has caused them.

Creativity and tolerance

There’s a final reason why I think I am more fluent, yet also identify more strongly as a person who stutters than ever before. Shortly after completing the City Lit course, I met a woman whose experience of stuttering was similar to mine. Not only did Constance stutter, but most of her family did, simply as my mother had done. Finding myself part of an extended family of people who stutter, although with great variation, was a joy.

In the early years of our marriage, Constance and I found ourselves having to do a lot of public speaking for work. It was a new experience for both of us. We would spend hours rehearsing presentations at one another, which would generally begin with a giant block followed by moments of verbal collapse throughout.

We were trying to pass for fluent, and by the time the talk came, most difficult words had been carefully ironed out. I think the whole process made us less self-conscious and we prepare less intensely now. If we stutter, that’s fine. And, of course, just that mental acceptance means we do it less.

At the time of writing, our two children are learning to speak. If learning to speak is a form of stuttering, when does it become considered a ‘problem’? And if one of our children does stutter, will we take them to speech therapy, and at what point?

As one of the many born with a speech disorder, I dream, for future generations more than anything else, of their acceptance. But there is an unexpected risk here. Once the shame and the coping mechanisms disappear, once the fear of language and the need to use it differently are rendered obsolete, will speech disorders still have the same creative and productive characteristics, or will they diminish? I want to preserve rather than eliminate such qualities.

The solution, I think, is to go one step further. As well as accepting speech disorders, let us all distrust language a little more: vigilant for the delusions and misuses it is put to; more open to experimentation, trying unusual words, strange sentence structures, and resisting rather than striving for more consistent use.

Rather than seeking for better inclusion of people with speech disorders in society, let’s instead seek to make society use language more like they do. We will, I think, be more tolerant, creative and wiser for it.