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From: Joseph Dewey
Date: 24 Oct 2005
Time: 07:02:40 -0500
Remote Name: 67.182.228.63
Hi Emily, this is a really interesting question. You are right that this is going to be a lot different with stuttering versus cluttering, but that there are probably some similarities. Cluttering is full of "effortless" disfluencies, where stuttering has "effort-full" disfluencies. That means that there is no physical struggle for the clutterer while they are cluttering. But, you are right that speech is exhausting for a clutterer in a lot of ways. I think that most of those ways are emotional. Do you the feeling of how when you have something to do that you don't like to do and you're not good at it, that it's totally exhausting? For another person that likes to do it, the activity may even be invigorating, but for you it’s exhausting. It's the feeling that a lot of people get from giving a 5-minute speech in public. That's probably a good way to describe how speaking makes a clutterer feel--just mentally exhausted because they really need to do it, but can't do it well. Something that I'm really interested in is how clutterers subtly change as they get older. I think that your question really hits on one of the things that happen as clutterers grow older, which is that their personality changes from a very extroverted personality to more and more of an introverted personality. Most cluttering children are extremely extroverted, but I think that as they have experience after experience like you described, that it wears down on them and eventually they become more and more introverted, just because communication is so difficult. And, it's not really difficult in that it's hard for the clutterer to attempt--it's difficult in that it's hard for the clutterer to succeed at it. Thanks again, Joseph