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From: Peter Reitzes
Date: 10/1/03
Time: 8:35:06 PM
Remote Name: 172.175.238.133
I enjoyed reading your paper. You concluded by writing:
Perhaps we would have achieved more without the stammer, but that isn’t the right perspective. The right perspective is to see what we have achieved, in spite of the stammer, and how much of an achievement that really is. I think that we should focus on this, and feel good about ourselves.
I completely agree with you that we should feel good about ourselves. One of the best things I learned from self-help and from speech therapy was to stop beating myself up for stuttering. As a covert stutterer until I was 23 years old, I certainly had a few achievements under my belt. I was graduating from college with a BA. The problem was while I had achieved much, I felt very negative about my future. I remember having a mental list of jobs that I could not do. At the time, many people I knew thought I would make an excellent attorney. The problem was that I never even imagined the possibility that I could be a lawyer because I was too ashamed of the possibility that I may stutter and I knew that changing my words and avoiding speaking situations would not be an ethical way to go. I can even remember being a kid and thinking that I could not be a professional baseball player because that would require giving interviews on television.
You also wrote:
Nobody likes to stammer, so if we can avoid stammering—if we can avoid publicly stammering, regardless of the turmoil within—why shouldn’t we do so?
My answer to this is that being a covert stutterer did not work for me. One day, near my graduation from college, I decided that I either had to accept my life with all of its restrictions, or change. It was hard, but I decided to stop hiding and avoiding stuttering and start facing it. Every year since that decision my life has only gotten better. Sure it was hard to come out of the stuttering closet and explain to friends and family why I was stuttering all of sudden, but the tremendous burden I was carrying was lifted. I remember feeling for the first time in my life that I really could do anything I wanted. This feeling of freedom came to me only after I allowed myself to stutter and only after I allowed myself to be a stutterer.
Please know that I respect and appreciate your paper and opinions and just wanted to share with you my own experiences growing up a covert stutterer.