Prose Partner Paul on his Stu-stu-stu-STUTTER
Stuttering. Stammering. Speech impediment. Ironically, all words that if needing to be uttered aloud are likely to strike fear into the heart of those who suffer from what they describe. That’s just damned cruel, in my opinion.
I was a severe stutterer, and to a much lesser degree, I still am. If I even foolishly endeavour to replicate my former affliction and purely pretend to stutter, it rushes back into my being as if a floodgate has been opened. If I’m nervous, excited or unsure of something I’m trying to explain, it rears its ugly little head again. I’ve covered this briefly in my Why Prose piece a few months back whereby I explained how words were initially my nemesis and then my saviour that helped me overcome the stammer. However, I wanted to go into that a little further, if you’ll permit me; and for a variety of reasons.
I was surprised and very touched to hear from other Prosers who have battled with, or are still battling with, the same hardships. I was gratified to be told by them that they found the article supportive. Just that would have been enough, honestly it would. However, I was also recently asked to deliver a talk at a monthly meeting of Creatives about the path that brought me to being the writer I am now. Despite the public speaking element scaring the shit out of me, I did it, and I was, as always, overly honest; particularly with covering the speech impediment issues.
That part of it, more so than any of the talk of my books or creative process, seemed to strike a chord in, as well as inspire the very people I look up to. It wasn’t necessarily the stammer itself, but seeminglly the overall message of a young boy obstinately overcoming seriously big obstructions and taming the very beast that was his enemy.
As I delivered the talk, I was unsure as to whether time had caused the speech issues to be exaggerated. Shortly afterwards, however, my Dad dug out the audio tapes of me as a kid. We sat, listening to them, slack jawed. You see, we’d both known of and spoken about my speech impediment, but the years had eroded exact memories to the extent that we had begun to believe it hadn’t been as bad as we talked it up to be.
It was bad. So, so bad. We sat listening and cringing; but not for very long. It was too painful and a testament to those around that showed such patience in not finishing my sentences. So if you read the last piece that this was part of, some of this will be common ground — sorry.
It’s a bit clichéd, I know, but the divorce of my parents hit me hard at only five years old. This was the exact age I developed an intense stutter; so it’s safe to assume the two are inextricably linked.
Like anything in my life, if I do it, I do it balls to the wall (whether it works or not) and that was certainly the case with my stammering. Sometimes it would seem like days dragged by between the start and the end of a simple sentence, one which I was painfully aware would take those around me mere seconds to deliver, effortlessly.
A tiny, proud boy, I had refused to go to speech therapy. It was the seventies, and back then, it just wasn’t the done thing to have any kind of therapy despite my parents saying I should. I wasn’t stupid though, and even as a child I had noticed that certain sounds, particular combinations of letters would be the culprits that tripped me up on my linguistic journeys. The susurration of an ‘s’, followed by a ‘t’ midway through a word, were just two examples of a myriad of phonetic possibilities that brought forth my mounting dread as I saw the sentence stretch out ahead of me, knowing the blockage in my throat was coming.
What felt even worse was the tolerant and sympathetic looks I’d see on people’s faces, watching me struggle, desperate to finish my sentence but knowing they shouldn’t.
I made the conscious decision to arm myself with the very things that were my enemy. Words. I began to read voraciously, immersing myself in other worlds to avoid the shitty parts of mine. Each book I read offered not only an escape, but also alternatives to the standard limited vocabulary of a child of my age. I began to negotiate my way through the stammering pathways, planning ahead of each sentence and using language that avoided the pitfalls I had learned were there. And so began a journey that would negate the need for speech therapy.
My love affair with linguistics was therefore very much underway as my Sister and I lay on the grass on a golf course with my Dad, replete with burgers and pancakes as our Dad pulled out a battered paperback with a sly smile on his face. On the front cover of the book was a picture of a huge black rat, fearsome teeth and evil eyes staring out, daring you to enter its world. Bold, bright red writing screamed out that the book was called The Rats, and the author was James Herbert. Dad began to read a chapter to us. There was blood, gore, swearing and sheer horror. I was absolutely, entirely consumed; obsessed from that moment on. I then consumed so much blood and horror and gore written by adults, and in turn churned out my own versions, that not only did I escape from the cruelty of those seemingly physical blockages in my throat, but the world itself.
The stutter remained a slow work in progress, but it steadily waned as I read more and more books written with older audiences in mind. My teachers marked my works warily, with big marks for spelling, punctuation, grammar and writing style; whilst commenting upon why a nine-year-old would be writing about zombies, ghosts and murder. Poetry was flowing out of me too, mostly about the darkened corners of life. All this from such a cheerful little chap. Words were my escape, my love, my friends and they garnered praise, albeit tentatively, even in the ‘anything goes’ seventies and then into the video-nasty eighties.
By the time I hit my teenage years, my stutter only appeared when nervous or excited. Certain words containing the evil letters would still need a mental run-up. The worse were B, D, G, P, S, T and the biggest perceived mountain; ST together.
But it was a fairly simple process, and in all honesty didn’t need meandering alternatives to enable swerving the buh-buh-blockage in my speech. For example, if I was to say the sentence ‘ten strange, stylish certificates on a Saturday’ I’d visualise it ahead of me like a path that I’d need to negotiate and would take a mental run-up. Yes, it was a linguistic route filled with traps, but I merely armed myself against it by using undemanding alternatives.
“Ten strange, stylish certificates on a Saturday” would become “A few fashionable awards on a weekend”.
It was that simple, and it still makes sense. Yes, at times there was artistic license, but people got the gist, and as a bonus, they didn’t need to suffer, listening to me agonisingly work my way through a sentence for two minutes.
It was purely accepting what tripped me up, and working to that shortfall that did, and still does it. Nothing miraculous, just simple logic. If certain letters were my enemies, then why fight them? Make friends with the letters and words that didn’t trip me up (or did so to a lesser degree), and everybody wins.
And like I said, the stutter still comes back, mostly now when I’m uncertain, or nervous. Now I am a writer and a ghostwriter. I also work for Prose, the online writing community. My life is language and my world is words. The varied hats I wear mean I interview someone and have to listen to it played back whilst I transfer it to a written version. That’s when I hear it now and again, but not nearly as much as I did. It’s a ‘verbally walking on the spot whilst deciding which direction to turn stutter’, rather than the ‘stuck in a bear-trap of words stutter’ of my formative years. I can live with that.
So words really were and are my friends, I just have to make sure I hang out with the right ones.
By Prose Partner Paul. Please follow and get in touch with him as @pauldchambers on theprose.com
More information on the speech impediment can be found through these links:
http://www.stutteringhelp.org/faq
Related
Originally published at blog.theprose.com on December 30, 2015.
