From Stuttering to Confidence

My school was an all-girls school, and because it sat a long way from where my family lived, I spent part of those years in a dorm. Living there threw me together with people I never would have met otherwise. One of them was my roommate, a gentle and caring girl who happened to be carrying a heavy depression. I'll call her Dana to keep her private. She stuttered. Ask her almost anything and you could watch her body tighten, her words catch, and then the stammer would take over.

It happened even with classmates and teachers, the people I assumed she felt safest around. Strangers terrified her outright, so she refused to step outside the dorm by herself. When she needed a train ticket, she handed the task to someone else rather than face a clerk. The fear ran that deep. It bordered on agoraphobia. Other girls started keeping their distance from her, and at night she cried, mortified by the way every interaction seemed to go wrong.

The part that hurt me most was watching her slip. Hope drained out of her a little at a time, and she grew quieter and more alone. Her grades fell. I wanted so badly to do something for her.

Paying attention to her gave me my first real clue. Alone in our room, one-on-one, she talked with me easily and clearly. The stutter only showed up when she approached me in class or anywhere other people might hear. So the problem wasn't her mouth. It was her sense of being watched, judged, found wanting in public. I waited for a calm afternoon when she seemed relaxed, and I asked her about her childhood and her family.

Dana was an only child. Both of her parents taught for a living, and they had kept her on a short leash: study, study, study. She told me she had barely socialized as a kid. She had never even played games with other children, which stopped me cold when she said it. That upbringing, strict and sealed off, seemed to me the root of everything. I told her I believed the stutter could be beaten, but only with professional help and a great deal of work from her own side. The depression and anxiety riding alongside it had to be addressed too, since they fed the stammer.

The following week the two of us sat down with the school psychologist. She stayed with us for more than two hours. She gave Dana practical ways to steady her speech in the moment and a longer plan for working the problem out of her system entirely. She was honest that none of it would happen fast, and she stressed that recovery would demand sustained effort from Dana herself, not just from the people around her.

From then on we worked on it together. I kept pointing out her strengths and making sure she noticed them, trying to rebuild the picture she held of herself. The quiet goal underneath all of it was to loosen the grip of the depression and anxiety through the sessions with the psychologist and through small, deliberate steps she took on her own.

I still feel real respect for how hard she pushed against her fear. She started to grow more at ease around people, and ease was the whole battle, since the trouble had always been her painful self-consciousness. She fixated on what others thought of her and dreaded any slip she might make mid-sentence. A handful of her close friends and I kept telling her the same thing: mistakes are normal, everyone makes them, and a stumble in conversation is not a verdict on your worth.

She took up daily yoga and meditation to wear down the tension, and it gave her some peace. Alone in the room she read passages out loud to sharpen her pronunciation. Her parents were brought in to meet the psychologist as well, who coached them on how to actually support her instead of pressing harder.

One exercise did a surprising amount of good. Every day she stood at the mirror and pictured herself as someone who could speak with ease on any subject. Sometimes she imagined the face in the glass belonged to a teacher or the principal, because those were exactly the people she wanted to address without flinching. Talking to yourself is a different animal from talking to a living person, and the mirror let her bridge the two.

Her teachers pitched in. They would ask her to read a few lines from the textbook aloud in class, and later to say a little about some small topic in front of everyone. The stage fright shrank each time they did.

Two years in, she could talk straight through without stuttering. A faint stammer still surfaced during presentations, but by then she carried herself with enough confidence and smiled through it in a way that covered the gaps. She kept making friends, and the two of us studied hard together for our exams.

On graduation day, after she received her Junior College degree, all of us, friends and teachers alike, asked her to give a speech. For everyone who had watched her journey, it was the moment. She was nervous, a little tight, but she thanked each of us and carried the speech to the end. We knew what it had cost her to stand there and do that, so we rose and gave her a standing ovation. Dana was a strong and stubborn woman, and I think of her with a lot of respect. Wherever she is, I'm sure she has kept growing.

Author: Anonymous Contributor