Confronting my own imperfections

There are things in my life that I feel like I want to tell everyone, but either the opportunity never presents itself, or I chicken out. But then I figured I have a blog...and despite the fact that only like 5 people read it, it's better than nothing. So here's something I've been thinking about for a while. It might be sort of unpleasant, so if you're in a good mood and want to stay in a good mood, go watch TV or something.

I'm one of those people that believes in some sort of destiny, fate, serendipity, whatever you want to call it. I don't believe the universe is based on some cosmic lottery or happenstance. There's a system, a plan, or a reason for everything. However, I don't believe that if you sit on your ass and wait that things will just come to you. As a capitalist a classic liberal (that's classic liberal, i.e. someone that believes in liberty), I believe that people make their own destiny. But ignore that second part for now...I want to focus on the first.

There's a saying that I'm probably misquoting that goes something like 'There but before the grace of God go I...' which is pretty much saying that if it weren't for that aforementioned system, plan, or reason, someone else could easily be essentially living your life. For me, that plan, reason, or more accurately that destiny...can be traced back to an e-mail address on a flyer at the Student Learning Center at UGA. But before I get into that, let me start from the beginning.

Those of you that know me well know that I stutter. Those of you that know me really well know that I can stutter pretty bad at times. And those of you that know me the best know that it's shaped my personality in ways that make me very bitter and irritated. And those of you that don't know me that well, well...now you do.

I've spent most of my life trying to hide it. It was/is something that made/makes me feel very ashamed. People tell me it isn't something I should be ashamed of, and perhaps it isn't. They certainly mean well in saying it, and I appreciate the sentiment, but these people have likely never experienced the shame of being laughed at in front of the entire school for taking a good 30 seconds to force out a 7 word line in a play being performed by the gifted program. Most people don't lay awake at night the day before the first day of school, band camp, or anything else that involves meeting several new people, being nervous to the point of physical sickness at the prospect of having to introduce yourself in front of a group. Because you just know that when it's your turn, it isn't going to go well, and that the rest of the day is going to be filled with questions that include, but not limited to 'why can't you talk?', 'what were you doing when you were trying to say your name?', 'don't you know your own name?', or, my personal favorite -- after being forced to read aloud on the first day of 6th grade -- 'why don't you know how to read?'. What a great first impression THAT made.

Maybe it's shame, maybe it's fear, but most of all it's just a pain to deal with. I know it doesn't make me stupid, but try explaining that to all the people that just heard you screw up saying your own name. If I didn't know any better, I'd probably think I was stupid too.

People almost routinely tell me that the people who genuinely care about me won't be bothered by it, or, most popularly, 'the people who matter don't care, and the people that care don't matter'. This is true. The people that truly care about me aren't going to think any less of me as a person, and the very few that do think less of me aren't worth my time anyway. But that isn't to say that the people who care about me don't 'care' that I stutter, because I know that they do. They care in as much as they pity me, or feel sorry for me, at times to the point of tears. And that's a burden I would really rather not bear. Seeing my mother cry as I struggle to read aloud is one of hundreds of memories I wish I didn't have.

Granted, stuttering isn't the worst affliction a person can have, and I cannot truly complain. Stuttering isn't going to kill me, and there's nothing physically wrong with me save for the inexplicable disconnect between my thoughts and my mouth muscles to express them. So I suppose it could be argued that my shame, or at the very least, my concern, about stuttering is based in vanity. I would be inclined to agree. But so is pretty much every other disability. In a society where the overweight starve themselves to lose a few pounds, where the poorly-endowed have bags of silicone injected into their chests, where men have hair chiseled from other parts of their head and reattached on the scalp, and where prime time television is filled with commercials for penis enlargement and erectile dysfunction, I don't think it's unreasonable to be upset that I can't speak fluently.

So there you go. I stutter, and it pisses me off. A lot. I hate it, and sometimes it makes me want to break things. It bothers me, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I think I'm done letting it run my life. I'm done feeling the shame of being a legal adult and having other people make important phone calls for me. I'm done avoiding drive through windows, and picking what I want at restaurants based on what's easiest to say.

As I sit here in my apartment, some 600 miles from where I started, I realized something. The fact that I stutter almost kept me from getting here.

That flyer in the SLC was asking for conservative writers for a new alternative newspaper. I answered the ad, and a semester later I was in charge of the whole damn thing. A year after that I'm sitting in Washington, DC getting paid far too much for doing less than what I used to do for free. But for the grace of God that flyer had an e-mail address and not a phone number. Because if it had had a phone number, I know I wouldn't have called it, and thus I wouldn't be where I am today. And quite frankly that's the stupidest reason I can think of to miss out on an opportunity like this. To think that I would've given this up for a few uncomfortable seconds on the phone is infinitely more shameful than any amount of stuttering I could do. I'm going to see that it never comes to that.

Winston Churchill stuttered, and he helped win a world war. What's my excuse?