Stuttering For Life

My name is Brian Wood. There’s a decent chance that if you asked me to say that sentence to you in person, I might not be able to. I’m 42 years old and I’m a stutterer.

I’m what is known as a covert stutterer. I’m sure that most of my close friends realize I stutter, but a lot of my more casual acquaintances do not. A covert stutterer is someone who represses their disfluency through an ongoing, in-real-time stream of substitutions and evasion. I first became aware of my stutter at age four, and since then I’ve very nearly perfected the art of staying covert.

I have a database in my head of words I know I can’t say, with alternate phrases standing by to replace them. I can anticipate several words ahead of myself in conversation and select a substitute for something I sense I won’t be able to say. I buy time with filler words, or I’ll pronounce a partial word, often not speaking the first sound (i.e. Pacific Ocean will be “acific Ocean” and most people don’t notice.) The result most people will notice is a slightly halting speech pattern, that has, at different times, been interpreted as uneducated, rude, snobbish, cold, or just plain stupid.

I don’t get to say what I actually want to say. This is the price I pay for speaking: eternal vigilance and compromised communication.

As a child, and a teenager, the stutter was profound, and despite my older brother and at least one cousin also stuttering, there was not a lot of support or understanding to be found in semi-rural Vermont in the 1970’s. My tactic was to put my head down, only talk when necessary, and lamely grin along when jokes were made at my expense or people mocked me, just to make it through the day. Other parents thought I was stupid, mentally delayed, and would keep their kids away from me. Put bluntly, it was humiliating and sorrowful. I was also painfully skinny, wore glasses, had pizza face, didn’t have a father, and my family was Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was a target in pretty much every way possible. I looked inward for happiness: reading, running, making art, being alone.

I exited my teenage years with a couple solid friends, and went on to college where I made a few more. The stutter lessened a bit and I got better at staying covert and I began to learn that I could hide it from some people entirely, which significantly changed the game. But I never spoke about it, never volunteered the fact. If someone brought it up to me, I could redirect that conversation in about two seconds flat. I cringe at the very thought of having to speak about it, even now.

In that way my career as a fiction writer was great, because I could just sit alone in a room and have the written word be my voice and could take my time to properly construct my thoughts exactly the way I want them. But when the social part of my budding career became a reality (signings, interviews, panel discussions, pitch meetings), it was like middle school all over again.

I read these periodic articles that talk about all the famous people who were stutters: Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, James Earl Jones, Joe Biden, Emily Blunt, Tim Gunn, Shaq, and so on, and while that’s really cool to hear, they’re all people who, at least from what I can tell, have eliminated their stutter. I always wished for someone on that level who still stuttered and didn’t try and hide it.

Because, at this point in my life, my stutter isn’t going away. I don’t think I want it to. It’s as much of who I am as anything else. I’ve lived with it longer than anything else in life.

Brian Wood
www.brianwood.com