Four words. That was all that came out. What was supposed to be a quick three-minute speech felt like an eternity of utter humiliation. I just stood there, wishing the ground would swallow me up.
I paused to catch my breath and start over, but I felt my eyes watering. I blinked fast, hoping to escape the tears. I tried to pull myself together, but I was only getting worse. My throat constricted. I swallowed hard, and as I opened my mouth to speak, nothing came out.
During a group presentation in my eighth grade social studies class, we had to create a poster explaining a series of political cartoons and present them to the class. There were no more than 15 students in the classroom, all lazily preparing their presentations after we had returned from lunch.
Everyone seemed calm and composed while I rhythmically bounced my leg, dried my clammy hands, and repeated my mantra, “Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth.”
After the first two groups presented, my group was called up. I immediately regretted eating spaghetti for lunch. My stomach churned and I felt my lunch wanting to make its way back out.
We stood in unison and walked to the front of the classroom. I turned to face the class, closing my hands into fists. I prepared myself and started:
“I-In mmmy pppolittical ccccartoon…the mm…” I tried to force out the words over the silence that hung over the room.
I continued saying the sentence, “…the mmain iddea wwas…” and on it went for what felt like 10 minutes, with pity-filled eyes staring back at my own filled with tears. Every single one of my classmates stared right at me, not one of them looking away.
By the time I finished, I felt as if I had just run a marathon. Left with an overwhelming feeling in my chest, I tugged my shirt down and shifted my eyes from person to person. I felt an urgency to regain my composure.
I remember thinking, “After practicing this presentation so much, how did I only manage a couple sentences? When would the voice in my head be the one I hear when I speak?”
Growing up with a severe stutter, public speaking was my worst nightmare. I remember it beginning around the age of seven, but my family and I didn’t officially acknowledge it as an issue until I was 10.
For two years, every Tuesday and Thursday after school my mom and I would take the bus to my speech consultation. As I sat in the waiting room with about 15 other kids waiting for their sessions, I dreaded the questions my therapist would ask:
“Are you having a good or bad speaking day? Did you bring the list of words you felt most stuck on?”
I read out loud all the time and we did yoga but sometimes when she asked if I was doing better, I lied to make her feel like the exercises were working.
After two years of speech therapy, nothing changed. My sessions felt repetitive and neither my stutter nor my public speaking improved.
When I started high school, seeing little improvement, I decided to stop attending therapy. Although a part of me felt like I had given up, that was the moment I finally took it upon myself to truly deal with my internal struggle.
What may have been nervousness that led me to stutter as a child, had become a mental block. I would stutter whether I was nervous or not. It was just a constant.
I spent so much time trying not to stutter that I was only limiting myself even more. Only when I stopped trying did I finally feel a weight lift from my chest. No longer did it matter how stuck I was on my words. I tried feeling at least a little accomplished when the ideas I was expressing were clear.
Still, the experiences I had as a child with my stutter continue to haunt me. There are times when I am fluently reading out loud and almost instantly I’ll be reminded of the feeling I had when I was younger and would stutter while reading aloud. It’s almost as if I’m setting myself up for a specific moment where I’ll get stuck. But it never comes.
Sometimes when I’m reading aloud, I’ll skim ahead, and if I spot a word I think I’m going to get stuck on, my brain is already preparing for that moment. A ball starts to inflate in my chest and my breathing gets shallow and quick. But then I read the word and continue, and I’m left with only the aftereffects of a stutter, not the stutter itself.
I’m in college now, preparing to graduate soon. My speech impediment remains, but with time I hope to overcome the trauma of being barely able to speak at all.
