Not as alone as it seems

Before school let out, or I guess more accurately, before I graduated, I used the last issue of the GuardDawg as platform to raise stuttering awareness. It was actually little more than a thousand word autobiography about some of the crap I've had to deal with and how none of the therapy/devices I've had haven't helped me. I thought it would help reduce my shame and fear of stuttering, but at the time I wasn't really seeing the pointlessness of telling a couple of thousand people that have no idea who I am that I stutter.

Aside from that, I talked about the rarity of stuttering. Depending on the definition of stuttering, there are between one and two million stutterers in the country...which means only one in between 148 and 295 people stutter. So it's not like a lightning strike...but it's pretty rare that I see anyone else stutter.

But I was flipping through the channels, and happened to stop on some local access thing in DC. Incidentally, it was this black lady talking about her experiences as a stutterer. And to be honest, I never thought I'd relate so well to a middle-aged black woman.

Listening to her tell her story, I was thinking she might as well be telling my story...from meeting in a storage closet with a school-assigned speech pathologist and feeling painfully ashamed as she read into a tape recorder, to not ordering what she actually wanted at restaurants, to avoiding the phone at all costs. I could actually feel myself getting emotional in realizing that she'd been through a lot of the same pain and frustration as I have.

However, as she started talking about how she started to confront her stuttering and overcome it...I could no longer relate. She talked about facing her fear and just stuttering as much as it took to say whatever it was she needed or wanted to say. As might be expected, there was a lot of crying and such on her part as she went through all of that. And above all, it was very brave of her.

And that's why I couldn't relate. When it comes to that, I'm more or less the antithesis of brave. I can keep my cool when I'm spinning out on a major highway at 70 miles an hour, I don't mind walking around D.C. by myself in the dark, and I don't think anything of running onto a field like an idiot in front of 90,000 people. But when it comes to anything having to do with speaking, I turn into a 4 year old boy being told to go into a basement that his older brother told him was haunted. It's admittedly pathetic.

As much as I talk about dealing with it...I'm not nearly as progressed I would like. I still felt ashamed in explaining to my boss what was going on sometimes when I talked...and the idea of having to introduce myself to people is still horrifying.

There's some part of me that can't let go of the idea that people think less of me because of it. 'Cause let's be honest...as much as chicks dig a guy that plays piano and likes painting...I don't know of any girl that's ever been like 'I need to get me a man with a speech impediment...' And no girl wants to take a guy home to her mother and proceed to have him stutter his ass off...it's just not attractive.

I know in my head that that's probably bullshit...but vanity is a powerful thing. That's why plastic surgery is such a lucrative industry. People are unhappy with themselves, and they'll pay to fix it. Believe me...if there was some surgery that eliminated stuttering, I'd be the first one on the operating table.

But unfortunately there's no such surgery. So I'm pretty much stuck with this until I decide to really suck it up and seriously deal with it. I just seem to have a problem with taking that leap.