{I don’t know how frequently these will pop up. But I’ve always wanted to find a way to poke at my relationship with my stutter, and to share it in case it was of use to anyone else. Not that enough people see this for it to matter now, but perhaps someday … the goal–at least the goal right now–is to capture some of the everyday impacts, the things that float by without notice. Writing about the dramatic–the time I gave myself a nosebleed from stuttering, the leaping off the bed to say a girl’s name to ask her out, the moments of public panic–is fine, but those are moments that are harder to interpret: they become stories, not just part of the mundane movement of life. So …}
We’re at the Houston Arboretum, one of our favorite places to go and walk with Messi on the weekends. If you are actually viewing this on the web, and hit refresh often enough, you’ll see him in the banner, seeming to smile with his tongue lolling out. A note about Messi: he’s one of those dogs, the rare kind that never snaps, never bites, is absolutely phenomenal around kids. The kind where you could lay a steaming piece of meat on the floor in front of him, and he won’t move for it until you give him permission. It borders on the bizarre.
Back to the arboretum.
A family appears in front of us on the path, and the mother reaches protectively towards her young boy, who can’t be more than four. His eyes light up at the sight of our dog, but his body arches towards his mother’s legs.
I smile at them and say, “It’s all right.”
And then time does that weird thing it does multiple times a day when my brain is moving faster than anything else can happen, and I hear the words I want to say in my head, he’s a lover, not a fighter, but I know right away that I’ll stutter on the l and that there’s nothing I can do at the moment to keep that from happening and I evaluate the interaction, my desire to put them at ease with the knowledge that the noises that will come out of my mouth combined with the awkward grimace that will accompany them will most likely do the opposite and I make the call that is the easiest in the moment to not say anything else or to say something else but not what I meant to say or to just smile and make a noise to Messi and to move on and it’s all over faster than you think and they certainly aren’t aware that anything untoward happened, but I am, I am, I am aware of the loss of a moment.
A moment of possible connection, a shared smile, perhaps even the boy being able to run a hand tentatively along the smoothness of Messi’s pewter fur while he panted patiently. A moment lost, because I stutter, and because despite knowing how to manage and control my stutter, I constantly make the choice not to–it’s incredibly wearisome to manage your speech, to work so hard at something that is supposed to be natural, in the moment, easy.
Instead, this moment–sun dappling the path in front of us, sweat trickling gently down my back from the Houston summer, the sound of cicada’s droning in the distance, the weight of Messi’s leash moving gently in my hand–becomes one moment out of many each week where something that would be the better thing to say, the funnier thing, the thing with better timing, the thing that would set people more at ease, the thing I wish I could say, remains unsaid.
That’s not quite right. It is said, but only in my mind, and then rejected. So it is said, and it leaves behind the shadow of the decision not to say it out loud, and that shadow lingers, sometimes briefly and sometimes not, but always for a little while.
When I read David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (which will be the subject of a Reading Well at some point), I was intensely eager to see how he described his own experience of stuttering. It seemed a disappointment: the things that rang true were the obvious (social isolation, the intense need to develop a wide vocabulary so plenty of synonyms were always at hand for word substitutions, the easy target that it gave the bullies of our youth), but it seems that every stutterer’s experience may be unique. Given how pervasive it is, perhaps this is unsurprising, perhaps having something so basic as speech impacted this way naturally leads to a multitude of expressions, each woven so tightly into the context of a specific life that they are easily recognized at a distance, but blur into separate threads the closer you examine them.
I know people who have structured their entire lives around not speaking. And then I look at my own: radio show host, loudmouth in and out of class, occasional actor, teacher in many contexts including professor, leader, etc. To mangle one of the most mangled quotes ever:
All fluent people are alike in their fluency; every stutterer is disfluent in their own unique way.