DateDate: Sat, 18 Jul 1998 10:44:45
EDT
From: R...@...COM
Subject: Post "Coming Out" sadness and grief
Hi Everyone,
- I had my long awaited job promotion interview yesterday before
a panel of 5 top hospital executive and medical directors. I did well,
generically speaking, and had the distinct advantage going in of
being the only internal applicant and having significant recognized
achievements, making me a very natural choice. I will find out if I
am to be offered the position on Monday afternoon.
- The issue for me is beyond those realities and the outcome of the
interview. It is about my stuttering and how I experienced it
yesterday... I stuttered a bit more than my usual in the beginning of
the interview, as I might expect in a such an anxiety producing
situation. I was very well acquainted with 4 out of the 5 on the
panel, who I have worked with, some closely, in the past year and a
half... I followed my instincts, as well as the advice of my fellow
Stutt-L'ers in bringing my stuttering up for discussion, and asking if
there were any questions I could answer for them regarding it. That
went very well, especially with the medically minded questions
presented to me which served to clear up any possible
misconceptions about stuttering that there may have been. The
consensus was that no one felt my speech had ever interfered with
my job performance. The opportunity had been seized by me to be
open, and to feel empowered in doing so. (It also put the issue and
their response to it on record, which is probably a wise thing to do in
a competitive job market.) After leaving the interview room, and
even after receiving personal positive feedback from my immediate
boss who was one of the panelists, I found myself in a contemplative
state, and sort of at the edge of emotional lability.
The closest understanding I had of my emotions at the time was
the discomfort of being seen openly as a PWS (both by my
demonstration of dysfluency, and by my candid discussion of it) by 3
people who had not known I was a PWS until then (or so I perceive.)
Now, a day later, the sadness is less pervasive, and I am able to place
it a bit more clearly. It feels like I am grieving a loss... perhaps a loss
of a perceived ideal of self? (like I blew my cover... one that I have
with only a few people.) (Emphasis added -- LH)
I don't have a handle on the details of my feelings beyond this right
now, but I feel as if I am getting close to something I need to grasp.
It seems to be at the root of a powerful emotional reaction that grips
me every so often, and can often send me into tears
instantanteously.
- Anxious to hear some feedback and suggestions as to how to
move through this "emotional quandry" I am in at the moment, from
anyone who is kind enough to share.....
- Thanks. Just want everyone to know that before Stutt-L and
discovering NSP, I never had the insights into myself that I have
now..and the thirst to understand more and more.
- R...
- Return to main text
The act of denial produces strong avoidance,
which often requires intense mental effort and which carries its own
social and emotional consequences. This journal entry explores that
aspect of denial. In childhood I metaphorically thought of silence as a
place rather than a condition:
You have learned to live in isolation. Not physical but mental
isolation: you carefully construct a wall around your self, around the
silences. It isn't a solid wall, there are gates and windows, and inside
the wall the silences are a garden of peace, wordless and sensory,
and you are the gatekeeper and the guardian and the gardener, and
nobody may enter without your express permission. You foray out,
you visit the other world a lot, you send bits and peices of yourself
as messengers into reality to collect new experiences and bring them
back to the silences. But the core self, the self that matters, stays in
its cloister...
You reserve emotion, except the emotion of sheer frustration
from the inability to make yourself heard above the din of the babies
and the violin and Daddy's temper and Mother's iron
guidance...
You are very careful not to spend too much obvious time in the
silences. When you do you are reprimanded and called dreamy or
stupid...
In the alone times, at night, you fantasize being a mute, on the
lam from a wicked guardian, wise in the ways of the woods and the
animals but avoiding contact with other people until you are
captured, and then adopted, by a kindly gardener who gives you
flowers and dancing lessons, and does not expect you to speak.
Return to main text
My sudden confrontation with a classmate who
stuttered, which came upon the heels of some other serious personal
upheavals, was an intense experience that has stayed with me for
decades.
- One of your classmates is a sweet-faced pudgy girl who stutters.
You have never met anyone who does this before, and the first time
you talk with her you are swept by an epiphany of recognition that
pierces your conscousness and floods and swirls across your mind
like water from a burst dam. You realize at once and without
thought, how dangerously, dangerously close you are to doing that
yourself, and you thank your guardian angel that you have always
had the sense to keep your mouth shut when words won´t
come. How much more yet might you have to face if you should show
such grotesquery to Mother and Daddy! Quickly you thrust this new
self-awareness from you, forcing it deep, deep into your
subconscious, as far away from daily life as you can. Even in
recognition you dare not acknowledge: you put this behind the wall,
into the back garden of the silences, and at once, and at last, and to
your horror, it gives form to the bramble patch of things of which
you cannot speak.
Return to main text
CASE STUDY #7, one of several case
studies found onThe Stuttering Homepage.
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BACK button on your browser to return to this location, and
click on the link belowto return to your place in the main
text.
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The following are snips of letters which Charles
Lamb wrote to his very close friend and schoolmate, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, in the spring of 1798. Lamb was about twenty at the time.
To return to your place in Stages
of Coping, click here.
-
"Coleridge, I know not what suffering scenes you have gone through
at Bristol. My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six
weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble
servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I am got
somewhat rational now, and don't bite anyone. But mad I was, and
many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a
volume, if all were told..". (May 27, 1798)
- "Thank you for your frequent letters: you are the only
correspondent, and I might add, the only friend I have in the world.
I go nowhere, and have no acquaintance. Slow of speech, and
reserved of manners, no one seeks or cares for my society and I am
left alone. Allen calls very occasionally, as though it were a duty
rather, and seldom stays ten minutes..." (June 10, 1798)
- Return to main text
To My Parents
You´re getting old. There´s so much left unsaid,
so many bills still left unpaid, and so much past
that still lies unresolved and rotting. How I wish
that I could find the words to say the things
that I still need to say. Could you but face
the truth I´ve lived, and I the truth you´ve lived,
we could perhaps at last come to some kind
of understanding, maybe even love.
But there are chains upon my tongue. The seed
of fear which you have planted in my soul
reseeds itself with every passing thought
of love unloved and friendship unreturned.
The unappreciated, fumbling child
who was, who could not bring herself to speak
of unintended hurt, or ask relief,
who learned that when she spoke her words would fall
on deafened ears, she will not die. She asks
a hearing, yet she silent turns away,
fearing yet again her greatest fear:
rejection of her claim for justice due.
And twilight falls, the dark cannot illume
the page on which apologies are writ.
Shall I let you go and never make
you face the common sorrow we have wrought ?
But what point? Understanding never grew
amid the tattered jungle of our love.
Return to main text
The full text of John Harrison's essay can be
found on The Stuttering Homepage.
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material. Use the BACK button on your browser to return to
this location, and click on the link belowto return to your place in the
main text.
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Van Riper´s message to stutterers is part
of the folklore of the community of people who stutter. It is found on
The Stuttering Homepage.
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text.
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I had to come to terms with my own mild
stutter in order to reach a very isolated student. Here is the story as
it appeared in the December 1996 issue of Letting Go, the newsletter
of the American National Stuttering
Project (http://www.nspstutter.org/index.html).
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Marty Jezer describes his initial experience
with Toastmasters..
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Eric Bourland´s home page is both kind
and straightforward, and offers very good advice to others who
stutter.
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link below to return to your place in the main text.
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