What Writing Means for a Stutterer
By: Tolga Atabaş
Tags: Stuttering, College, Speech Pathology, Writing, Teens

Speech bubbles filled with confusion and disfluencies, transcribed by a pencil on a paper

Talk! Speak! Say something! Three easy commands, easily done by most. Not for me. Read! Another easy command, easily done by most. Easily done by me — in two languages, English and Turkish. For a stutterer like me, it is difficult to comfortably enter a social stage. There is a weight on your shoulder. You go up to someone and think twice before saying something. Think. Yes, stutterers think more than they speak. They even think more than they stutter. One cannot judge another because of their stutter, or any other face value. Everyone has to remember one thing: they are people with a disability, not a disabled person. I still have many abilities. I can read and think plenty.

It is true that my stutter may have caused a struggle for me. It is true that I felt inadequate. But, it is not true that I still feel these things. I lumbered through an everyday trail that many gracefully walk, but I still finished strong.

I remember being teased during my school years for my stuttering. I remember the depressed feeling of not being able to respond with anything at that moment — both because my speech muscles were tensed up, and because I plainly had nothing to say due to the shock. I remember talking to my speech therapist, never giving names. I remember always being compassionate.

I value compassion and understanding. By reporting those students to the school’s speech pathologist, I would not have gained anything, other than their reprimand (and what does that really do?). I always aim to understand that people do not do these actions out of the blue; they have a reason, or a lack of one. Most people do not even acknowledge stuttering to be a legitimate problem. I believe that without my speech disfluency, I would not have developed this characteristic. I understand feeling different.

My passions and distractions were strong enough to endure the constant oppression of the stutter. I would escape reality by delving into a book — at that time I greatly enjoyed the adventures of Percy Jackson and other novels by Rick Riordan. There were many other things I could do as a middle-school student. I cannot enumerate all of them, however, I can say that my family occupies a sizable chunk of my support structure and is related to many of my different passions and distractions. They encouraged me to read, and so did many of my speech therapists, albeit out loud. Reading was one of my favorite passions and distractions. Reading out loud, however, I did not like. According to my therapists, reading out loud would help me practice speaking sentences by giving me the (private) space to focus on words and their relation to our various speech muscles. I tried it, but not consistently. Eventually, I was dismissed from speech therapy because I reached a level of “fluency”.

As the days and years went by, I was able to find communities and groups that could see beyond the stutter and get a peek to my true self. It turns out that I had been living behind a curtain, one that other people placed in front of me.

As I progressed through high school and now into college, I had the opportunities to meet many different people from many different stages in life. I learned to throw myself into new experiences just to expand my boundaries. After doing this for a few years, I realized that I have so much to add, and could not do so before since I was limited not by my stutter, but by the attitudes I encountered in my environment.

I remember one day when I was volunteering at my local hospital on a hot summer afternoon, a non-English speaker came up to me. Immediately, I could relate to the struggle of not being able to speak and get a point across. Luckily, I was able to muster up a sufficient amount of high school Spanish to answer his question and guide him to the proper department. This is an embodiment of one of reasons I do not hesitate to learn. It is also an embodiment of the issues in communication and its widespread impact.

It was not until I realized that I have an impact on my communities, that I started to appreciate myself more. I cannot lie, my stutter led me to close myself off. I only started opening back up in my senior year of high school and later on in college. Of course, the pandemic has not done much to help with this, but it is just another hurdle in the long road that has one direction: forward.

There are many other stutterers that have gone forward and had a great impact on people’s lives. The president-elect, Joe Biden, has reported on his own stutter, highlighting that a stutter does not define a person or their intelligence. In fact, there are many other public speakers who have stuttering issues, such as the voice for Darth Vader, James Earl Jones. Each of them have their own set of passions and goals to keep them moving forward. Each of them influenced me in writing this piece, sharing a perspective that is not shared. I also have to praise Vince Vawter for introducing the stutterer’s perspective to literature with his book Paperboy.

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A large part of my experience with stuttering has been training to use different techniques to control it. But, I always wondered why I stuttered. We went to multiple speech pathologists. They all said the same thing: the origin is unknown. I remember those brisk words: “It will always be a part of you, you just have to learn to control it”. It was truly an epiphany, a necessary one. There I was, thinking all that time that I was trying to get rid of the stutter. Instead, I had to focus on keeping it, but just changing it up a bit. That is when I decided to transform this socially-appointed flaw into my masterpiece. In Japan, they repair their broken pottery with gold, a technique known as kintsukuroi, transforming the flaw into a rich story.

I have turned my speech into my voice — my story. This is my kintsukuroi. I speak for what I want to do, to help. I talk. I speak. I read. I think. I write.

Writing is the only time when the “playing field” is truly even for me. I like to write :)