Being OK With a Stutter

“It’s going to be okay,” is the advice I often say I’d give my younger self.

It’s also the advice I give people who stutter, as well as parents and caregivers of those who stutter.

It’s a sentence that can just sound like a cliche in our current world, so I wish people knew how much I meant it.

I don’t say that phrase lately. I have friends who are depressed, and it drives me nuts when people say to them that things will be okay. After all, we don’t know that, do we?

What if it’s not?

And yet, I am quick to use it for stuttering.

I think part of it is because I feel if the person is already interacting with me, or with people in this community, they’re already on a pathway for okay-ness.

Stuttering, on its own and isolated from stigma, is not harmful. This is unlike the way depression feels… it’s not always true for anxiety (though anxiety as its own thing, as a bodily reaction, isn’t inherently always bad - it’s more complicated than that) … but for stuttering…

Well, as my gramma said to me a few years ago, “It doesn’t really hurt anyone, does it?”

Lol. Gramma.

I know some people would argue this. But again, it often gets to the stigma of stuttering is harmful. The focus on fluency is harmful. Now - sometimes people do secondaries that cause them physical pain… this may be harmful, yes. But stuttering in general? Nah.

So if something isn’t exactly harmful by nature - like stuttering - then I can comfortability say once you’re on the boat of realizing that, it really will be okay.

And…

Once you realize the full okay-ness of stuttering, it becomes difficult to stomach a lot of things we see in the media or hear people say about stuttering.

I’ve seen people who stutter say “No one who stutters would choose to be a person who stutters,” and I don’t think that’s accurate. Now, if EVERY person who stutters was offered a cure, I’d probably take it because it’d be a little lonely to be the only human in the world.

I think a more truthful statement is, “Not everyone who stutters wants to change their innate speaking voice.”

If when I woke up each day, I was presented with 2 buttons - one where I would stutter all day, and one where I would not, I’d rather just skip it entirely. Let me just continue on with the voice I have now. It’s my voice. I feel rather protective of it. I spent far too long thinking it needed to be something else.

I’m very comfortable with my stutter. While that isn’t always common, even among those within the acceptance community, I like to think it will be one day. The less external stigma people face, the less internal stigma has a chance to fester.

I hate the stigma. I absolutely hate the stigma around stuttering. It is demoralizing and it hurts.

But I don’t hate my stutter. I learned to separate those two things. The more I learned to love myself, the more it included my voice. And my voice? Well, it stutters.

And I refuse to hate a part of myself any longer.