Life on Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter

1

Nothing in Your Hands

You know, you don’t have to do this, Jeff says. His voice has a fatherly tone. You and I could get out of here. We could go get breakfast. He’s kidding, but not really. If I say yes, Jeff will say okay, and we’ll ride the elevator down to the lobby and not speak of it again. It will just be one of those days, another morning when I vanish rather than talk.

He leans against the makeup counter with his back to the mirror. My face is caked in concealer, but I can still see my acne scars, the dark circles under my eyes, my imperfect shave. I look scared, like a little boy getting a haircut who shrinks into the swivel chair as the clippers buzz toward his ears. Jeff is my boss; I can tell he’s concerned. I want to take him up on his offer. I want to stand and leave and forget about all of this.

Eventually he says good-bye and good luck and pats my shoulder on his way out the door. I walk over to the little room where I’m supposed to wait. When I was young, my life was defined by little rooms. There was the speech therapist’s office with the mysterious wall-length mirror. There was the windowless room in the basement of my elementary school. Everyone in class knew I went to the little room, but nobody wanted to bring it up. I never brought it up either, because maybe if I ignored the problem hard enough, it would disappear. That’s what we were all hoping for—me, my mom, my dad, my brother. We’ve spent decades waiting for this strange thing to exit my body and drift away. For dozens of reasons, it has stuck around.

I’ve avoided almost anything resembling public speaking my entire life. But now I’m here, sweating through my shirt as the minutes tick by before they call me onto the set. My knee is bouncing uncontrollably. I’m staring at the floor, sipping a lukewarm black coffee that I struggled to order at Dunkin’ Donuts earlier this morning. The cashier flashed me a familiar pity smile.

I stayed late at my office last night, sitting across the table from Helen, a public-relations person at my company. We entered a little room on the sixth floor and she turned on a fake newscaster voice to lead me in a mock interview. I couldn’t get through one answer. She kept pushing me forward.

Let’s run through it again, she said.

Okay, try again.

Again?

I couldn’t start sentences. I’d break eye contact. I’d fiddle with a pen as a distraction to help me get to the next word. I wanted to leave, but she stayed, so I stayed. We began again and I reached for the pen. Helen, with sweetness and sadness and grace, said, Let’s try one with nothing in your hands.

The reason I’m in this little room today, MSNBC’s Midtown Manhattan green room, is because twenty-four hours ago my life changed. I had spent nearly thirty years hiding from one word—the s word. You’ve already figured out the word. I’ve spent paragraphs avoiding the act of typing it. When you’re young, you internalize that stutter is an ugly word. Everything about stutter is weird: those three t’s, that uh in the middle that makes you think of dumb. Stutter lands with a thud, like gimp or retard. Your instinct is to run from stutter, to move the conversation away from stutter. Stutter is painful and awkward and something nobody wants to talk about.

Today is Friday, November 22, 2019. I’m here because yesterday I published an article in The Atlantic about the man who has become the most famous living stutterer, and I’m about to do something I’ve never considered doing: talk on TV. Just under twelve months from now, Joe Biden will be elected president of the United States. He somehow made it this far without tens of millions of people realizing not only that he stuttered as a young boy, but that he still stutters as an old man. There are dozens of writers at my publication who are more talented than me, more deserving than me, more qualified than me to interview the next president. I landed the assignment for the sole reason that I stutter, too.

You’d like to think that when these moments arise you stride toward them—chin up, chest out, triumphant horns blaring somewhere in the background. Right now I’m just scared. In ninety seconds I’ll walk onto the set in a blue blazer with a transparent earpiece and a battery clipped to the back of my belt. I’ll try to play the part of a person who’s supposed to be there. But the moment I begin to speak, I know I’ll make people uncomfortable. I have no idea how difficult these next fifteen minutes will be. And I have no idea what’s waiting for me after that.

2

Dead Air

Nearly every decision in my life has been shaped by my struggle to speak. I’ve slinked away to the men’s room rather than say my name during introductions. I’ve stayed home to eat silently in front of the TV rather than order off the menu at a Chinese restaurant. I’ve let the house phone, and my cell phone, and my work phone ring and ring and ring rather than pick up to say hello.

…Huh…huh…huh…

I can never get through the h.

It’s the same sound you need to summon when your teacher takes attendance at the start of each school day. I’ve dreaded the confirmation of my presence in a physical space—Here!—because I know the black hole of the h will swallow the ere.

I understand that my stutter may make you cringe, laugh, recoil. I know my stutter can feel like a waste of time—of yours, of mine—and that it has the power to embarrass both of us. And I’ve begun to realize that the only way to understand its power is to talk about it.

Since that morning I first stuttered on television, I’ve had profound conversations with stutterers from all over the world. I wanted to know how other people deal with it. Most of the time I just sat and listened, but I inevitably asked a version of the same question: How do you make peace with the shame of stuttering? What do you do with all the anger? The resentment? The fear? How do you accept an aspect of yourself that you’re taught at such an early age to hate? I’ve also had some unexpected conversations with ghosts from my past. Now I’m trying to answer a few of the questions I’ve been asking others.

—

I’M STARING AT A MESSAGE from a stranger named Elizabeth.

Hi—Although we haven’t met…

I almost delete it, but I keep reading. Elizabeth says she has just returned from Maine, where she happened to visit her son’s kindergarten teacher, who at one point spoke glowingly about an article she’d read, written by a former student.

After a couple of back-and-forths, I suddenly have my kindergarten teacher’s email address. Soon, I’ll have her phone number. We make plans to talk, but now I’m too embarrassed to dial. Why am I doing this? Why would she remember anything about me? I tap out her number and nearly hang up.

Ms. Bickford says hello and her voice sounds exactly as it did twenty-seven years ago. She’s loving and stern, soft-spoken and matter-of-fact. I recognize this voice as the narrator of countless childhood stories. I can see her holding a book, one thumb on the spine. She carefully rotates it so that I and the other cross-legged kids on the carpet can absorb the illustration before she turns the page. I feel calm when she reads. I enter a daze when she reads.

She was the first person to notice something was wrong with me.

One of the things we used to do—I don’t know if you remember this—was something called ‘Daily News,’ Ms. Bickford says.

As the phrase leaves her mouth, the tiniest of knots forms in my stomach.

Every day, when it was time for Daily News to begin, Ms. Bickford—she now goes by Mrs. Petty—would unfurl a chart of white paper at the front of the classroom. Each kindergartner was assigned a specific day of the week to come prepared with a piece of news to share.

I would sit there and I would write, ‘John said,’ in quotation marks, and whatever sentence you would say, we would all read it back together, she reminds me.

I struggled with this activity from the start. At first, Ms. Bickford thought it was a memory issue. She proposed that the night before my news day I should peel a sticky note off my mom’s yellow pad and draw a picture, a prompt, any sort of catalyst. I loved the Baltimore Orioles. I used to sketch asymmetrical baseballs with jagged little stitches coming off the hide.

Let’s imagine my news: Last night, my favorite player, Cal Ripken Jr., hit a big home run. I’m standing at the front of the class. I have my sticky. I know the words. I feel the words. But I can’t start the sentence and I don’t know why. When I finally push the first word out, the second won’t come.

You didn’t like that part of the day, she says. There’s a twinge in her voice. Our nostalgic phone call has turned quiet. You were just this sweet little guy with great curls.

My Daily News presentations never got easier. I soon hated being called on at all. Eventually, Ms. Bickford had a conversation with my mom: Something is wrong. I think you should have him evaluated.

—

WHEN MY SPEECH IMPEDIMENT appeared in the fall of 1992, stuttering was viewed as something to be fixed, solved, cured—and fast!—before it’s too late. You don’t want your kid to grow up a stutterer.

Only since around the turn of the millennium have scientists understood stuttering as a neurological disorder. But the research is still a bit of a mess. Few experts can even agree on the core stuttering problem. Some people will tell you that stuttering has to do with the language element of speech (turning our thoughts into words), while others believe it’s more of a motor-control issue (telling our muscles how to form the sounds that make up those words).

We start developing our ability to speak as babies. Our little coos and babbles are batting practice for future vowel and consonant sounds that will in time become sentences. Between 5 and 10 percent of all kids exhibit some form of disfluency. A child may speak without issue for the earliest years of his or her life, then, like me, start to stutter between the ages of two and five. For at least 75 percent of these kids, the issue won’t follow them into adulthood. But with each passing year, it becomes harder and harder for a stutterer to speak fluently, or without interruption. If you still stutter at age ten, you’re likely to stutter to some extent for the rest of your life.

It’s helpful to think of stuttering as an umbrella term to describe a variety of hindrances in the course of saying a sentence. You probably know the classic stutter, that rapid-fire repetition: I have a st-st-st-st-stutter. But a stutter can also manifest as an unintended prolongation in the middle of a word: Do you want to go to the moooooo-ooo-oovies? Then there are blocks, which are harder to explain.

Blocking on a word yields a heavy, all-encompassing silence. Dead air on the radio. You push at the first letter with everything you have, but seconds tick by and you can’t produce a sound. The harder you force it, the more out of breath you become. The less breath you have to work with, the less likely it is that you’ll move enough air through your lungs and larynx to say the word. Some blocks can go on for a minute or more. A bad block can make you feel like you’re going to pass out. Blocking is like trying to push two positively charged magnets together: you get close, really close, and you think they’re about to finally touch, but they never do. An immense pressure builds inside your chest. You gasp for air and start again. Remember: This is just one word. You may block on the next word, too.

We’re told that three million Americans talk this way, but it doesn’t feel that common. It’s partly a hereditary phenomenon. A little over a decade ago, the geneticist Dennis Drayna identified three gene mutations related to stuttered speech. We now know there are at least four such stuttering genes, and more are likely to emerge in the coming years. But even the genetic aspect is murky: stuttering isn’t passed down from parent to offspring in a clear dominant or recessive pattern. Even when it comes to identical twins with identical genes, only one of them might stutter.

The average speech-language pathologist, or SLP, is taught to treat multiple disorders, from enunciation challenges (think of someone who has trouble articulating an r sound) to swallowing issues. Yet many therapists are ill-equipped to handle a multilayered problem like stuttering. Of the roughly 150,000 SLPs in the United States, fewer than 150 are board-certified stuttering specialists. Even today, there is strong debate within the medical community about how to effectively help a person with a stutter. Many teachers don’t know how to deal with it either. It’s lonely. You may have a sister or dad or grandparent who stutters, but in most cases, there’s only one kid in class who stutters: you.

—

I WAS BORN IN Washington, D.C., and grew up in the leafy suburb of Takoma Park, Maryland. My mom was a nurse at Children’s Hospital. She’s one of seven kids, right in the middle, the compromiser, the peacekeeper.

She’d pick up my older brother, Matt, my only sibling, and me from school with off-brand sodas from Safeway waiting in the cupholders of our laurel blue Honda Accord. When we got home, she’d make me a grilled cheese on Pepperidge Farm bread. She’d walk into the TV room with the hot sandwich on a miniature cutting board in one hand, a bowl of potato chips in the other. She always had an endless stream of crumpled Kleenexes in her purse. (She’d hold a tissue to my nose and tell me to put the fire out.) One Halloween I stood in the living room as she wrapped me head to toe in Ace bandages, turning me into a mummy. She used medical tape and pins from her nurse’s kit to bind the disparate strands of first-aid material together. As she covered more and more of my body, she issued a dire warning: If you have to pee, you better do it now.

Ms. Bickford’s news was hard for my mom to hear. She called our pediatrician, who referred her to a speech pathologist, who determined that I indeed had a problem but couldn’t offer much in the way of help. We waited for a while, hoping it would get better on its own. It got worse. My next option was to see the multipurpose therapist in the little room at school.

My brother and I attended Holy Trinity, a Catholic elementary school in the city. My parents could afford it only because my mom cut a deal with the principal: she’d volunteer as the substitute nurse in exchange for discounted tuition. On the days she showed up at school for duty I’d head to the nurse’s office in the basement and eat lunch with her on a laminated placemat. I loved those afternoons. But to get down there to see her, I had to walk past the little room. I hated that room. Every time I entered that room, I felt like a failure.

—

THERE’S THE KNOCK. Kids stare as I stand to leave class. I walk down two flights of slate steps, turn the corner, and enter the little room. Everything in the little room is little: little table, little chair, little bookshelf. But now I’m older and can hit a baseball and win Knockout at recess, so the decor is infantilizing. I’ve always been tall and gangly. At seven, my knees barely fit under the table. Most little rooms are peppered with the same five or ten motivational posters: neon block letters, emphatic italics, maybe an iceberg or some other visual metaphor to explain your complex existence. This little room has a strange brown carpet that I stare into when the school therapist brings up my problem. She’s careful never to use the word stutter.

Okay, let’s start from the beginning.

There’s a stack of books on the table that are meant for people younger than me. Most sentences in these books are composed of one-syllable words. The vowels on the page are emphasized—underlined or in bold—a visual cue for me to stretch out that sound. Today we’re going to practice reading car as cuuuuuhhhhhhhh-arrrrrrrr. This is embarrassing. I know what car sounds like. I know how other people say car. Doing this exercise makes me feel like an idiot; not only is it hard to speak, but now it seems like I can’t read. Every time I block on the c, I sense a pinch of frustration from across the table. After enough attempts, I can read one whole sentence in a breathy, robotic monotone.

Thuuuhhhhcuuuuhhhh-aaarrrrdrooooovefaaaaaaast dowwwwwn thuuuuhhhhh rrroooaaaad.

For some reason, this way of speaking is considered a monumental success. I think the way I just read that is more embarrassing than my stutter. But I have to keep doing it, because it’s the Big Rule: Take your time.

Have you ever told a stutterer to take their time? Next time you see them, ask how take your time feels. Take your time is a polite and loaded alternative to what you really mean, which is Please stop stuttering. Yet an alarming amount of speech therapy boils down to those three words.

After about forty minutes, I’m sent back to class. I exhale as I leave the little room. I climb the steps, crack the door, and shimmy back to my desk with a nervous smile. I roll my no. 2 Ticonderoga pencil between my thumb and index finger, scratching a fingernail against the metal part below the eraser, trying to release some of my frustration. I’m convinced everyone’s wondering why I just walked out and returned a while later without explanation. I flip to a new page in my workbook and glance at the clock. I lower my head, praying not to be called on.

—

MS. BICKFORD HAS TAUGHT hundreds of students over the years. How did she remember all of those details about my stutter? Now I was wondering what others might remember. Roughly a month after our call, Ms. Bickford connected me with Ms. Samson (now Mrs. Southern), my second-grade teacher, who later became my fourth-grade teacher. She’s now in Colorado, raising three boys. She’s still teaching.

I love the fact that you’re writing about this and putting it out there, because, gosh, from a teacher’s point of view, there’s not a lot, I mean, I wasn’t trained… She searched for the words. I wasn’t told how to handle this.

Holy Trinity was divided into an Upper School and a Lower School. The older kids had a cafeteria, but the younger kids ate lunch in their classrooms. Ms. Samson kept a little radio on the corner of her desk. At lunchtime, she’d tune in to WBIG Oldies 100, and the space in front of the whiteboard would become the second-grade dance floor. Each afternoon was like a kids’ wedding reception, and every day I couldn’t wait for it to start. I’d wolf down my turkey on white then push back my chair and dart to the front of the class. You knew that the station’s midday DJ, Kathy Whiteside, had queued up a total hit parade: the Four Tops, the Supremes, the Temptations, Sam and Dave. This was an ideal time to work on your Running Man, or to whip out an invisible towel and do the Twist.

When Ms. Samson cranked her radio, my shoulders dropped and my lungs felt full. We looked like doofuses up there in our khaki pants and plaid skirts, but we were a unit of doofuses. This has special meaning when you’re the class stutterer. An hour ago you were flustered and out of breath, pushing and pulling at a missing word, sensing that familiar sweat drip down the back of your neck. Now you’re just another kid doing the swim to Under the Boardwalk. One day you sashay over toward Michelle B. You giggle at each other. One afternoon you make eyes at each other. A new song starts. Jackie Wilson’s voice lifts you higher and higher.

Then the music stops and you crash back to earth.

Your face would turn blotchy. Really, really red, Ms. Samson told me. You would cut your comments short because it was just too much work, or you figured, ‘I lost the audience.’ But your impulse to participate—that’s how I knew: ‘He’s thinking. He’s thinking and he wants to talk.’ That was the hardest part.

This is the tension that stutterers live with: Is it better for me to speak and potentially embarrass myself or to shut down and say nothing at all? Neither approach yields happiness. As a young stutterer, you start to pick up little tricks to force out words. Specifically, you start moving other parts of your body when your speech breaks down.

I still do this, and I hate it. I don’t know why it works, but it does: when I’m caught on a word, I can get through a jammed sound much faster if I wiggle my right foot. Blocked on