stuttering in isolation
isabel armiento
I’ve always loved words but dreaded speaking. Ever since I can remember, people have told me there’s something wrong with the way I speak. Most people would call it a stutter, though people who don’t know me may think that I stammer through my words because I’m shy, or painfully awkward, or simply lying. They hear speech disfluency and think of insecurity—Did I stutter?—or anxiety—Piglet’s frightened Oh d-d-dear, though my stutter looks nothing like the endearing repeated syllables of animated anthropomorphic pigs.
My childhood speech pathologist said that I suffered from what was called vocal blocks: sometimes, the word I want to say simply won’t come out. To illustrate, she handed me a Chinese finger trap, watching as I wriggled my fingers into the contraption’s outer holes and struggled to pull them back out. She explained that the finger trap was like my vocal cords, my fingers like my words: the harder I pulled, the more tightly stuck they were.
I try to appreciate the silver lining to the pandemic: rather than stammer out half-baked insights in front of my peers, I can now type them up into a virtual classroom, even edit them for clarity. But somehow this virtual conversation doesn’t feel anything at all like, well, conversation. As my spoken words dwindle, they become precious—even the ones that stick in my throat, like fingers in a trap.
As a writer and a stutterer, I’ve developed an ambivalent relationship with language. I fear it, as any writer should, and yet I am obsessed with it. When I speak, I’m constantly running through lists of synonyms in my head, searching for the alternate word that will emerge from my lips unscathed. I quickly determine the pattern of words that will slide smoothly off my tongue, eschewing words that begin with hard vowels in favor of those that begin with voiceless consonants. Often, my stutter forces me to choose a word I wouldn’t have otherwise used—sometimes a better word, always a fresher word.
My stutter has affected me in countless ways, mostly insignificant. This year I tried a pumpkin spice latte for the first time (it was delicious)—I’d been robbed of the pleasure as a teenage girl simply because I feared the Starbucks barista’s inevitable question, Could I get a name for that order? (like most stutterers, my name is the word I dread saying most). Mostly, I’ve learned to control language rather than simply fear it, using synonyms or carefully-constructed sentences to minimize vocal blockage. My name is Isabel, rather than simply Isabel, the soft s sound in is mellowing out the sharp i sounds that follows. I have become so accustomed to constantly consulting my built-in thesaurus that I often forget how deeply my stutter affects me.
Stuttering slows things down. Friends often become frustrated when I hit a vocal block, offering me the word they suspect I’m struggling with rather than waiting for me to wrestle it out myself. Having a conversation with me means disrupting the fast pace of your life. It means slowing down and waiting, which for many people feels uncomfortable, even impossible. In the attention economy, every writer is fighting to prove that their words are worth taking time out of your busy day to read. I am doing this not only when I write, but whenever I open my mouth: fighting to prove that my words are worth the extra time it takes to listen.
But now the attention economy has been put on hold, and not by the latest tech innovation, but by something organic, visceral. An illness. No razzle-dazzle is necessary to catch our attention now—we’re desperate to give it away. The lockdown has slowed everything down, and I’m letting myself slow down too. For the first time in a long time, I’m letting myself say exactly what I want to say, rather than dancing around it with safer words and softer consonants. Hungry for conversation, I’m allowing myself to stutter because my words are worth the extra time—and because now, others are truly willing to slow down and listen.
Stuttering has taught me to be better at conversation by forcing me to slow down and to listen more than I speak. I’m realizing that stuttering has taught me something else, too: that conversations aren’t perfect, and in fact, they shouldn’t be. Have you ever listened—truly listened—to a conversation that you weren’t part of? If not, try it—better yet, try transcribing the conversation. Whether the speakers are stutterers or not, the result will likely be nonsensical: a smattering of half-finished sentences and absurd noises. Conversations aren’t sequential; they don’t logically flow from one idea to the next; they aren’t grammatically correct. Conversations can even be wordless, composed entirely of gestures and unintelligible syllables: a nod, a grunt, a sigh.
A conversation meanders; it has no endpoint, works toward no goal. It lives in the pauses between words, the facial expressions. It lives in the silent spaces filled with meaning, spaces for people to listen to one another and react, making noises that mean, I see you. Spaces for people to feel connected—and isn’t that the point?
Because of my fear of speech, many of my most meaningful conversations are not conversations at all. They are emotional letters written to loved ones, clever one-liners shared over social media, virtual dirty talk, text messages that say I love you.
Isolated in our houses, we are retreating from real, in-person conversation—and we are missing it keenly. Conversation is not an edited paragraph shared with peers over a chatroom/classroom hybrid. It is not messaging your best friend over Facebook to offer exciting news. There is no space for real conversation in these logical, typed-up bytes of information, bound up in texts, emails, or tweets. Without space—for the pauses between the words, the nonsense syllables, the weird stutters and tics—we’re not having conversations at all.
In isolation, I am learning to appreciate my stutter. I am grateful that I learned to listen, to savor the slowness and imperfection of conversation. It is what makes us human. A bot can send an articulate email, but that bot can’t make a noise that simultaneously conveys hunger and excitement.
Today I texted my best friend, I miss you. Unsatisfied by the hollow words, I called her. Our conversation was full of nonsense words and ungrammatical phrases; full of abstraction and illogic and pauses and meaningless-yet-meaningful sounds. It was full of stuttering, and it was beautiful.
