I am a person who stutters. Stuttering comes in many shapes and forms — not only in the ways in which people stutter, but the kind of people who stutter are very diverse.
Leah Thomas
When I hear the word “stutter”, many thoughts and feelings go through my head. This has been a word I have heard all throughout my childhood and is a word which I believed defined who I was. From the first moment around the age of 8, little did I know I would be entering a journey full of challenges, hardships, and strength.
For people who stutter (PWS), the following scenario — or some variation of it — is all too familiar. You are standing in line at Starbucks. You know exactly what you’re going to order: Pumpkin Spice Latte. Grande.
Lani RoyStutter was a word I feared since I could remember, not only because I would block on the first “T” but because it was a word that I let define my every action. It decided whether I would raise my hand in class, join in on pick-up volleyball at lunch, or order through a drive-thru window.
Jordan Scott is an award winning, world-renowned Canadian poet who has stuttered his whole life. His first book of poetry published in 2006, Silt, won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His second body of work, Blert in 2008, directly addresses the experience of stuttering and language. He is also the author of Night & Ox, among other works.
In 1936, a statuesque 20-year-old named Mary Dowell was hired as a dancing girl for an extravagant Texas Centennial celebration in her home town of Fort Worth. Until then she had been, in her own words, “looked upon as a sort of freak” due to her height and pronounced stutter. “When I walked down the street people would look at me and grin, like I was the town idiot. I was the unhappiest girl in Texas.”