In Monday’s Washington Post they featured an article that gave a first hand look into the life of someone that stuttered. Journalist Dan Slater shared of his journey with stuttering, the daily feelings both physically and emotionally that he encountered, and his perspective on how others preceive him.
Here is a wonderful exerpt from the article:
My vocal cords would strangle certain sounds. Hard consonants – k’s, d’s, hard c’s and hard g’s – gave me hell. A year of speech therapy in childhood helped me develop a set of tools for defeating the impediment, or at least concealing it well enough to fool most of the people most of the time. Like many other stutterers, I evolved a verbal dexterity. Embarking on a sentence was like taking a handoff and running through the line of scrimmage: I’d look five or 10 words upfield, and if I saw a mean word, such as “camping,” I’d stiff-arm it and cut back hard in search of a less-resistant path, opting perhaps for something more literal: “I want to sleep in the woods this weekend.”
This article is a great read for anyone who stutters or knows someone that stutters. A great “walk” in someone else’s shoes. Read the entire article here.