How Hustle Culture Forced Me to Slow Down & Listen
I was diagnosed with stuttering in third grade. No one bullied me or made fun of me for the way I talked, but while I was telling a story to some of my classmates, my teacher overheard me and told my parents that I had a stutter. I went to a speech pathologist every week for about a year, learning exercises for overcoming speech blocks and blending my words. Eventually, I no longer experienced any speech disfluency and forgot that I ever had a stutter. It wasn’t a traumatic experience, I just kind of moved on with my life.
Fast forward ten years or so — I’m getting a double major in art history and Russian, I’m the head of marketing for campus events, I’m interning once a week at Christie’s (the auction house), I’m writing my thesis, doing freelance design work, living in a house with five people, trying to have a social life and, on top of that — I’m also trying to figure out who I am. I’m doing all the things I think I’m supposed to be doing to be successful.
About halfway through my senior year of college, I started noticing that I was having difficulty speaking. My vocal cords would get tight and I felt like I was choking on words every time I tried to talk.
The thing about stuttering is that it’s unique to the stutterer. For me, words that start with certain letters are worse than others but it’s pretty much every consonant: B, P, C, F, K, S, V, W, T, M, N, G, D, Z, J, L, Q, and R, coincidentally, which also happens to be the first letter of my name.
No problem, I thought to myself — my brain goes quicker than my mouth anyway, so I’ll just flip through my mental thesaurus whenever I need to find an alternative word to avoid a problem word. (This was really fun in Russian class.)
But throughout this struggle, there was no alternative word for my name, Rachel.
So every time I’m about to introduce myself to someone new, I’m filled with dread and anxiety about that first impression. There’s a high chance that I’m going to stutter saying my name — and if I do, will this new person think I’m stupid, will they make a joke that I don’t even know my own name, or will they just decide I’m not worth getting to know?
At this point, I was frustrated because I felt like there was a disconnect between the person I had been for the last 20 years of my life and the person the world saw me as now — as a stutterer. At my core, I was filled with shame for something I could not control. Watching someone’s lips as they spoke gave me pangs of jealousy. How could they not realize how lucky they were to be able to speak without thinking about every single word? And to have the words actually come out? I had taken it all for granted and I wanted it back just the way it was.
To try to help with my disfluency, I went to two speech pathologists who taught me tools and techniques, many of which I had learned back in third grade: pulling an invisible string at the top of my head, blending my words, slowing down my speech, reading lists of problem words while I sat in traffic, etc. There were small improvements, but I still had incredible pain at who I felt I had become — and my stutter wasn’t going away. I was doing all the right things, so I didn’t understand why this wasn’t working as it did back when I was in third grade.
Oddly enough, traditional therapy helped the most. Through therapy, I accepted my stuttering as a part of myself and let go of not feeling like I wasn’t good enough.
I also realized that over the last two years, I had been listening to and watching people more than I ever had before. And through that, my empathy for others grew. I saw that everyone had their own invisible struggle, even if it was worlds different from mine.
We’re all trying to do all the things all the time to prove that we’re good enough. I hit my breaking point senior year of college. I won’t say that I’ve overcome stuttering as the inspirational takeaway here — I’m still a stutterer and struggle with my speech on a regular basis — I’ve just accepted that stuttering is something that makes Rachel, Rachel.
As soon as I chose to accept it, the part of me that I feared so deeply became my strength.
As we go into 2022 with new goals and intentions, I hope my story inspires you to slow down, listen, and accept the parts of yourself that also make you, you.
