Shorts
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Stammering
I’ve had a stammering problem for as long as I can remember. It’s a very selective stammer—surfacing only when I try to say certain words, and that too only in certain circumstances—but it’s enough to play on my mind whenever I talk to groups of people1.
Usually one wouldn’t be comfortable writing about such a thing unless it was glaringly obvious, at which point it wouldn’t matter. But writing about things like this goes with the territory—I write what I think about, and this is one of the things I think about.
I’ve lived with this for close to 14 years, and I’ve tried to figure out what sets it off the hardest as a part of self-therapy in controlling and reducing it. The usual suspects are always there—anxiety, emotional state, et al.—but there are some specific triggers that seem to stay constant regardless of the situation.
Through various experiments, I’ve concluded that words starting with the sounds 'bə, 'pə and 'tə are the hardest for me say unless I’m already in a flow, i.e. not starting to talk again after a pause. So if I’m supposed to start a new sentence with a word like, e.g. bubble, I would get stuck unless I compose myself and try to say it with a little concentration. Of course, depending on the situation, words like “because” or “private” can be equally hard to say.
This might come as a surprise to many people who have spoken to me or heard me talk in person over the years—I would think even my parents to a degree. It’s like one of those things you probably won’t notice unless you are looking for it. I guess people who read this and know me in real life will have it at the back of their mind whenever they meet me from now on.
Though I must say that my condition is a lot better than a lot of other people who are suffering—in every sense of the word—from stammering. Mine is barely noticeable owing to the fact that I speak so less (whether speaking less is a cause or result of my stammering, I will leave it to you to speculate), and partly because I’ve worked on it for the past four to five years, trying to reduce its severity. It used to be so bad that I wouldn’t be able to say even my name properly (which I can’t, sometimes, even now).
My mother tells me that my tendency to talk has grown inversely with age. I.e. I used to talk a lot as a child, and now I barely do. It’s funny though; I don’t remember stammering as a child, but I do now. One of the great ironies of life. It’s funny enough to make me smile—sometimes.
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To be honest, it’s groups that make me uncomfortable, not individual people. Nothing gets a crowd going like realising that they’re a crowd. Talking to one person is a lot more intimate and I find it much easier to talk to a single person or very small groups of people; small enough that I can look them in the eye when I say something. ↩
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