As far as I can remember, I’ve stuttered. I think that I know why, but let’s put a pin in that and we’ll come back to it later. I don’t know if I stuttered from birth or not. My father stuttered, so it could be genetic.
I was born in Georgetown, Guyana in 1964. The reason that I mention this is because, at that time, Guyana was a British colony, known as British Guyana. As a result, my formative years were a product of an Indian growing up against the backdrop of colonial life. I started school at age 4 at a local primary school. My parents have an old photograph of my sister and I wearing our school uniforms on our first day of school. I looked smart in my short pants and blue dress shirt.
My earliest childhood memory was of pain. I clearly remember the teacher, Miss MacAndrew, telling me to hold out my hand just before she brought down her pointer on my left palm. You see, I was left-handed from birth and in those days, writing with your left hand was forbidden. There was nothing sinister about being left-handed. The reason it was forbidden was because, at that time, we used slates to write our work on. Slates were like mini blackboards for students. If you wrote with your left hand, you rubbed out what you wrote as you went along. That was the reason that left-handed writing was forbidden. Also, before the invention of the ballpoint pen, people used fountain pens. These pens had slow drying ink. Again, left-handed writing was forbidden as your palm would smear the ink before it could dry on the page. So, Miss MacAndrew was helping me to be a better student by literally beating my innate left-handedness out of me. Perhaps she didn’t know about ballpoint pens, after all they were only invented in the late 1800’s and subsequently perfected and patented in 1942. Ballpoint pens proliferated after World War Two. Perhaps, she wasn’t aware of that. And don’t get me started on pencils. Pencils had only been around since the late 1600’s. Miss MacAndrew was saving me from a life of smudged writing and she did a wonderful job. Today, I write exclusively with my right hand, but I can do other things ambidextrously like eating. Even the thought of writing with my left hand causes me such anxiety that I can only do it for a minute or less and I must stop. I have some other memories of that time of my life. I remember stuttering. I remember being a very quiet and shy child. I also remember that once I tried to write with my left hand in school and I was beaten so badly that my left hand swelled up so much that I couldn’t hold anything for a long time.
In 1971, my family emigrated from Guyana to Canada. I was 7 years old, going on 8. I started grade school. I remember being a very shy child because I was new to the school and I didn’t have any friends, and because I stuttered. I stuttered a lot. Grade school in Canada was painful. I had no friends; I was alone in the schoolyard during recess, and I was constantly picked on. Sometimes the teacher would take pity on me and ask me to shake the dust out of the chalkboard erasers during morning recess. Her name was Miss Steinmeyer. She wore her hair in a beehive hairdo. She was great.
As an immigrant family, we moved around a lot, so I was never in the same school for the first couple years of my time in Canada. In 1973, my parents bought a house and my family settled into suburban life. I started grade 4 at a new school. During grades 4 and 5, I was still a very shy kid. I didn’t answer any questions in class, even though I knew the answers. But, I did have a friend. He was my next-door neighbour and we went to the same school. His family were Jehovah Witnesses. He had to stand outside the classroom whenever the school played O’ Canada and recited the Lord’s Prayer. He was picked on too. I remember one day where a couple of bullies were picking on him during recess. I don’t know why, but I jumped to his defence and punched one of the kids. The other two kids jumped on me and kicked and punched me. I didn’t care. It felt good that I was helping my friend. When the teacher broke up the fight, I was sent to the principal’s office where I got the strap, this time on both hands.
Grade six was rough. My dad lost his job, but he found a teaching position on an Indian Reservation in Manitoba. He went on ahead and the family would join him later. I had a teacher named Mr. Layne. He was determined to shame the stuttering out of me. Whenever he asked the class a question, he would invariably pick me to answer, even though I didn’t raise my hand. I would try to stutter out the answer, some people in the class would laugh and I would cower in my seat, trying to be as small as possible. I remember one day, in grade six, the principal, a one-armed fellow named Mr. MacDonald was in the class observing. What he was observing, I don’t know. True to form, Mr. Layne asked the class a question and picked me to answer it. Mr. MacDonald was standing right behind me. I tried to stutter out the answer and Mr. MacDonald came up behind me and smacked me across the back of my head and yelled at me to “spit it out”. The whole class laughed at me, and I cowered in my chair even more. In October of that year, the family moved to Manitoba. School life while living on a reserve was wonderful, especially because I was the teacher’s kid with a speech impediment. It was fun times.
The rest of my grade school and high school were pretty much the same, however, I grew tall and big. There weren’t many people who picked on me and I largely ignored it. I took a speech therapy course at the Clarke Institute. It was the PFSP program. The course was somewhat helpful, although it left me with an artificial speech pattern, and I eventually dropped what precious fluency I gained. It’s hard asking someone out on a date using the fluency shaping methods that I learned in the program. I often wondered why I stuttered. Was my stuttering some sort of divine retribution for past misdeeds. My search led me to read a great many religious books, but in the end, there was no clear answer. It seemed that the root of stuttering was not connected to God, although I did learn that Moses might have stuttered. So my search continued. I experiment with illicit drugs like cannabis, LSD, magic mushrooms, morphine, heroin and others. The sedatives did help my stuttering while the stimulants only made it worse. In the end, I did not like the loss of control only to wake up the next day feeling truly awful. No, that was not a cure for stuttering. I read many books, only to find no answers there either. Surely, there must be an answer.
High school gave way to university, and I graduated with a Bachelor's of Science in chemistry and biochemistry. Science held no clues as to why I stuttered, but I continued to do my own research in why I stuttered. I met my first wife and we got married and had a child. I tried to look for a job where my stuttering would not be an issue. I became a courier driver. After all, how hard is it to say “Sign here”. It began with an ‘s’ so I could sneak up on the phrase without stuttering. Being a courier driver was not meant for me, so I began to look around for another job. I applied to an Ambulance and Emergency Care program. The college took my money and I graduated from the program. During my studies, I had to do a set amount of precepting hours with an ambulance crew. The crew were great and after a rocky start, they grew to like me, and I was running most of the calls. My stuttering was an issue, but not in the way I thought. I didn’t stutter under stress, I stuttered when I wasn’t stressed. I ran major calls without a hint of a stutter, but when I had to chat with the crew afterwards, I began to stutter again and that caused me stress which compounded my stuttering even more and I went down the proverbial spiral. After graduating from the program, I applied for a job with an ambulance service. During the testing phase, I was under stress. I didn’t stutter through the call, but I fell apart after the scenario ended. The testing invigilator noticed this, and we had an informal chat that also didn’t go well. The invigilator said that I did well on the test, and they would take a chance on me. If, however, I had placed anyone’s life in jeopardy, I would be terminated without recourse. Needless to say, I was happy to be getting a job, but I had a huge monkey on my back.
My career as a paramedic lasted for 4 years. I was confident in my skills and abilities. I still stuttered, but not when it counted. I remember having a meeting with my supervisor one night shift. He was a kind fellow. He was very matter of fact. He said that he liked me as an employee and that there was not an issue with my work. He told me that some of the other paramedics were asking not to work with me because of my stuttering because it made them uncomfortable. I was upset and angry. He advised me to find another job before the organization fired me. They wouldn’t fire me because of my stuttering, but they would find some other reason to do so. I thanked him for his candidness and caring. So I started looking for another job.
My job search led me to the RCMP. The hiring process was long and tiresome. First, there was a written test, then a language aptitude test, then a physical test, then a medical test and finally the interview. I remember the day of my interview. It was a clear day in January but the weather report called for a massive snowstorm in the afternoon. I had to drive about 90 minutes away to the interview location. The interviewer was an older Staff Sergeant. He must have had at least 30 to 40 years service. I arrived at the office about 10 minutes before the interview time of 8AM. I advised the Staff Sergeant that there was a snowstorm coming and that I do have a stutter. I said to him that “if my stuttering is going to be an issue, he could tell me at the beginning, and I could leave before the snowstorm arrived. He said that we could start the interview and if he noticed anything, then he would curtail the interview. The stress was on. I had to complete the interview, knowing that there was a snowstorm coming and knowing that I could be terminated at any time during the interview. The interview lasted eight and a half hours. My stress was incomprehensible. However, after the interview, the Staff Seargeant said that he didn’t notice anything to decline my application and that he was recommending me to move forward. My RCMP training involved 7 months of French Language Training. In my first day at the school, the teacher noted my stutter. I was taken from the class and given a lecture about disclosing my speech impediment during the hiring process. Once they checked my file, they realized that I had disclosed my stutter, so they sent me to speech therapy after my daily classes. When I finished at French Language Training, I was sent to Regina for police training at the RCMP Academy. On my first day there, one of the instructors drew me aside and advised me that I was unsuitable to become a police officer due to my stutter. I told them that I had disclosed the stutter in my interview and during French Language Training. Seeing no other alternative, they proceeded to send me to speech therapy in Regina. My entire career in the RCMP was a struggle to prove that I am a good police officer and that I deserve to be there. But I must have done something right as I was a member of the RCMP for 28 years, even getting promoted during the process.
I remember a day in my mid-thirties. I was still searching for a reason why I stuttered. Remember when I said that I’d circle back to a thought. I was trying to understand why I stuttered. Suddenly, I developed a thought. Perhaps, when I switched from left-handed writing to right-handed writing, there was a shift in my brain. Then I thought that perhaps, during the switch, the part of my brain that was responsible for speech, didn’t transfer over to the other side of my brain. Perhaps, the two halves of my brain were struggling for control of speech. Perhaps, both sides of my brain were sending impulses to my speech apparatus (lips, tongue, diaphragm, vocal cords, etc.), but one set of signals was arriving moments after the other set. Perhaps, this was the cause of my stutter. The fact that my father stuttered also, made me predisposed to this. So, I thought that I would experiment on myself. I got a Walkman (stereo cassette player) and hooked it up to headphones. I decided to turn down the volume on the right side, so that I was only listening to music on the left side. I did this every day after work for about three years, and I noticed small (almost imperceptible) changes in my fluency patterns. After three years of doing this, I began to speak “from my right brain”. This was kind of tricky, because I didn’t know what it meant to do so. I adopted a speaking style that was deeper in tone and imperceptibly slower in function. After about 3 years, I found that my fluency improved a lot. I also found that I could retain the emotional aspects of my speech without sounding robotic.
Today, I have retired from the RCMP and have started my journey with the BC Coroners Service. I still stutter, but in most cases, it is only perceptible to me. I know when I have a dysfluency and I know how to adjust. I am not saying that I have found the cure for stuttering, but I have found something that has worked for me. I just want to tell the people that stutter, you are not alone. There were times that I thought that I was the only one in the world with this problem. I’ve learned that that kind of thinking only brings isolation and despair.
The other thing that I want to let people know is that I have accepted my speech impediment. While I was a police officer, I have had to give evidence in court, be it Provincial Court or Supreme Court. Throughout it all, I have asked for the Court’s indulgence while I told the people in the Court that I do stutter and that if I said something that they didn’t understand, for them to ask me to repeat myself. I convinced myself that everyone in the courtroom (the judge, the jury, Crown Counsel, defence counsel and all the others) wanted to hear what I had to say, because I was the person with the story to tell. That way of thinking is empowering. In this way, I have owned my stuttering as a part of who I am. I own it, it does not own me.
There were times in my youth when I was trying to decide what jobs I should pursue that didn’t involve speaking. Today, I place no such barriers on myself. Finally, to circle back to Miss MacAndrew, I hold her no ill will. She has, in her way, shaped my life in ways that I consider unimaginable. Thank you for taking the time to read my story.