23 August 2023, St Margaret’s Berwick Grammar, Berwick, Victoria, Australia
Hey, I’m Kitty and I’ve been asked to speak to you all and bring some awareness to my neurological disability.
So to give you some backstory, I was born a normal healthy child. I was speaking and forming sentences like any other young child - in my American accent thanks to Dora the Explorer - when everything changed. When I was six, I began to struggle to speak, I would hold onto my words, repeat syllables, stand there with my mouth wide open while nothing came out. My mother took me to get testing done and it was concluded that I have the brain abnormality that affects 5 to 10% all of children. Stuttering.
We all hoped that I was like the 80% of child stutterers who get a stutter when there are around 2 to 6 then grow out of it within a year or so. With a stutter there is no exact cut off year for when stuttering goes from temporary to permanent. Childhood stuttering has 8-10 as the prime years for it to go away. But really it is fair to assume that once you turn eighteen, it will almost definitely be a reoccurring issue for the rest of your life as a long-term stutter. Now, boys are 2-3 times more likely to stutter than girls and also 3-4 times more likely to continue stuttering than girls. So originally, I thought I would be normal again.
So every birthday that passed I just hoped that I would wake up and it would be gone because I knew every set of candles I blew out meant I was closer to it being permanent. Even though I had accepted it, deep down I still wished it would go away. By fourteen I was certain it wasn’t going to go and now at seventeen it’s here for the long run. I am now a part of the 1 percent that stutter. A part of the 80 million out of all 8 billion people.
I’m not going to lie and say that I have grown to be accepting of this and don’t let it hold me back, because that isn’t true. It is something I battle with every waking moment. Watching everyone I know talk and act like it is nothing and take it for granted when I can only wish to be like them and be ‘normal’. It also sucks knowing that my own emotions are betraying me every day as well. When stuttering certain emotions make it worse, and by certain, I mean almost all of them. Whether I am tired, angry, anxious, excited, or sad, those emotions make stuttering a lot worse and a lot harder to hide. The only emotion that doesn’t make it worse is when you’re totally calm, but how often, especially in the presence of other people, are you completely calm and almost numb? Taking those emotions in, and also having to deal with the ticks that stuttering causes is difficult. Trying to stop the leg tapping, hand movements, finger clicking, neck jerks, constant blinking and still be able to feel peaceful and calm is basically impossible. Now sometimes my stutter goes unnoticed by me, and that is pretty often when I’m alone or with people I’m comfortable with. But when in front of a customer at my retail job, speaking to an audience, speaking on the phone, its draining.
I use so much more energy that the normal person just to function like everyone else. During the semester exams, I would get in the car and almost be unable to talk or keep my eyes open. I used so much energy trying to talk fluently because of my stutter, and read and write fluently because of my severe dyslexia and illegible handwriting as well as just having to study and then focus for hours of exams that I would be physically and emotionally exhausted. Like physically unable to move or talk or express myself, if I try it just ends in me holding back frustrated tears from exhaustion.
Every single day is a challenge. Years of speech therapy never worked for me. Every technique failed on me and one day after a session I met my breaking point and told my mum that I would never go to one again and after some hesitation she agreed and accepted my choice. Something as simple as ordering a coffee is embarrassing and difficult for me and speech therapy never made it any easier. Doing this speech and the two other speeches I did in recent weeks for house and music captain was one of the most stressful and scary things I did this year. Speaking to large groups of people is fine usually for me, the girls in house extrav sport all know how loud and talkative I can be, but the second I have something like a speech or book in front of me that I have to read, or am being assessed, my fight or flight kicks in and my brain shuts down my ability to speak. That’s why me standing here right now talking about something so raw and personal is a really big deal for me.
Growing up knowing there is no cure for my disability kills me. There is no surgery for stuttering or medicine that can cure it. Speech therapy only teaches you ways to cope and ways to hide it or will help a child grow out of a childhood stutter. For a long-term stutterer, it is 50/50, either helps you or doesn’t at all. I’m one of the unlucky ones.
I’ll end by mentioning one celebrity I love, not solely because of his movies but because of how he goes about his stutter. Samuel L. Jackson. He has stuttered all his life and even went mute for over a year because of how bad it was and how severely he was bullied in school. He has gone on to have a successful acting career, yet his stutter was never cured. The first article to come up when you google his name and stuttering it is “how Samuel L. Jackson cured his stutter” because we never see him stutter so it must be cured. But a director never uses the scenes the star messed up their lines and the same goes for when an actor stutters. He still has his days but is able to move forward and be successful in life. I strive to be like that and be able to have a career where I’m more comfortable with my speech impediment.
Right this moment, I’m still not overly happy about my stutter. I know that deep down I will always have that hatred for it. My goal today was to just spread awareness of it and share a little bit of my struggles and my stories as well as prove my terrified younger self that I can do a speech in assembly like everyone else. Thank you for listening.