If others don’t notice my stammer, can I really call myself a stammerer? My Stammer, Myself
was walking to my home in Toronto when a well-dressed man politely stopped me to ask for directions.
BY Isabel Armiento FROM THIS MAGAZINE
HEALTH
“Could you tell me which way to Bloor and…” He struggled to get the next word out, a pained look on his face, but I knew better than to finish his sentence for him.
“… Bathurst?” he said after several seconds of straining. When I started to answer, he told me that he didn’t actually need to know. He was practising stammering openly, he explained, hoping to become more confident doing so around strangers.
I lit up with excitement. “Are you doing that because it’s National Stammering Awareness Day?” I asked, always eager to connect with other people who stammer. When the man asked how I knew that, I said that I grew up with a stammer.
He nodded, looking a bit wistful: “And I suppose your stammer has magically disappeared since then?”
His question gave me pause. I understood why he assumed this—when compared to his fairly severe stammer, I sounded fluent, stammer-free. But even as we spoke, my stammer had influenced my speech: for example, I’d misnamed International Stammering Awareness Day as National Stammering Awareness Day to avoid the tricky front vowel sound at the beginning of the word—a sound I continue to struggle with.
And while it’s true that my stammer was more noticeable when I was a child, this was partially because I’d since found workarounds for difficult words and sounds, helping me hide the worst of it.
When I answered his question, I opted for the simplest explanation: that I had grown out of my stammer. But was this true?
ACCORDING TO DATA from the NHS, two in three children who stammer will go on to speak fluently. But are the supposed ex-stammerers completely free of their past disfluencies? Or do their stammers continue to influence their decisions and affect their lives?
Most people who meet me don’t notice my stammer, or, if they do, they chalk it up to shyness or insecurity. While most of the time I don’t stammer overtly—thanks in large part to my learned knack for word substitution and assortment of ready-made circumlocutions—many of my choices are still guided by a deep fear of disfluency.
Stammerers like me, those who can pass as reasonably fluent, are called “covert” stammerers, meaning that the most prominent features of our stammers aren’t the overt ones—the
