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From: Joseph Dewey
Date: 17 Oct 2005
Time: 01:42:24 -0500
Remote Name: 24.10.232.18
Hi Laura. Thanks for the question. I actually meant in retrospect I realized my speech was different. The first time I realized there was anything different about my speech was in speech therapy. I felt a lot different than everyone else, but I kind of thought that everyone just feels that way. And, I had people say stuff kind of indirectly about my speech throughout my life, but I think that because cluttering isn't well known that the lay person doesn't have a term for it. I remember a church leader pulling me aside when I was about 14 and telling me how communication was really important for my future career. He was pretty vague about it, and I never really connected that with my speech until after I learned about cluttering. I've had people tell me..."Joseph, just spit out what's on your mind" and "relax, don't be nervous" which I realize now as a reaction to cluttering, but I wasn't able to connect those statements to me having a speech problem. The other thing that I think benefited me was being good in math and that my math teacher in high school thought that I was really smart. I think that I avoided a lot of the negative things that come with having a speech problem, because I was labeled as being a "smart kid." People told me that they thought I was just to smart to be able to express all of my thoughts. And, with my parent's divorce, I really don't remember much from that period. I'm basing my speech getting worse on my handwriting samples. Weiss in his book gives an example of handwriting of clutterers, and my handwriting started looking like a clutterer's handwriting around the time my parents got divorced.