When Stammering Can Get You Out Of Trouble

When saying much less is the only way out of a situation…

In any situation, people with a stammer always find it hard to participate in social gatherings however small or intimate they may be. The main challenge is to contribute to a conversation as ‘normally’ as normal people usually do but without having faces wincing or staring at you with a hurried look or a veiled cynical smirk.

Stammerers struggle with their confidence in expressing themselves and, as a result, tend to favour the comfort and safety of their own company and prefer to indulge in the vagaries of their own thoughts and racing minds.

Now you may be wondering how stammering relates to me?

Let me explain.

There are many reasons behind acquiring this speech impairment condition and, some of them, may result from an unpleasant or traumatic experience at a younger age.

In my case, I started stammering at the age of nine or ten — or so my earliest recollection tells me. The circumstances were both mysterious and fascinating at the same time. And they both involved an unforgettable nightmare and a sleepwalking experience.

I grew up in a household of eleven members including my paternal grandmother. We shared a small two bedroom apartment with one toilet. My parent’s bedroom was the largest of the other bedroom and the living room. The kitchen was a good size and had a balcony on the north side of the building overseeing a back garden and a lovely view across the plains and the mountains ahead.

The household was running like clockwork; the well-oiled machine in the parent’s bedroom producing one baby at a time and passing it on to the grandmother after the nursing period has ended.

The childhood processing stage got underway in the form of strict rules and guidelines to ensure the smooth management of the increasing pressures on the storage facilities that were dwindling on a yearly basis. So I grew up sharing the living room with my grandmother, my sister and I think another brother or may be two; at that stage, my maths skills were still lacking.

One hot summer night, I remember I was sleeping on a makeshift bed on the floor of the living room. Some time that night, I suddenly woke up sweating from a nightmare; The overbearing feeling of somebody’s feet standing on me wouldn’t leave me as it was as real as my heart beat racing to escape it.

I looked around and there was nothing except darkness and the faint shadows of the coats hanging at the back of the door facing me. Then it dawned on me straightaway; if it wasn’t one of my shared occupants who inadvertedly walked on top of me in the middle of the night then there was only one explanation.

Yes, I was trampled on by a ghost! You may laugh and snigger at me but I felt the spirit, the ghoul, the invisible gremlin that, for some reason or another, may have overfed on babies around the world and then decided to test its weight on me.

In the scheme of things, this made a lot of sense, well, at least in our household where lullabies were about ghost stories to scare us into falling asleep! And, therefore, it was only a matter of time before these stories would turn into horrible nightmares.

As a result of this experience, I became afraid of the darkness for years to come. And, most likely, may have started off my even longer stammering journey.

The other possible contributing experience was waking up one morning next to my grandmother when I could’ve sworn I went to sleep in my own bed. Just before waking up, a horrible nightmare was pervading my subconscious mind with swarming ants scuttering all over me.

This is as vivid to me now as it was back then — over 40 years ago. I got up, dazed and worn out from whatever happened that night. My first port of call was my grandmother who was sitting down next to the breakfast table.

I asked for explanations about my bed teleportation experience overnight. She said that I woke her up in the middle of the night by me turning the lights on and then returning to my bed, sitting down and starting to talk to my pillow.

Being the old generation type, she didn’t know what was going on and all she could think of was that I was being possessed by a spirit and that the only way to exorcise me was to shake it out of me, which she did with abnegation.

Still that didn’t wake me up! Ultimately, she managed to coax me to go and lie down next to her.

It was my first experience at sleepwalking and, also, at talking to pillows. Thenceforth my young life became blighted with the fear of the darkness and the parsimonious use of speech, which kept getting caught between the traumatized vocal cords.

How to turn an impediment into an advantage

All things considered, my stammering didn’t help with my social life even though I was an outgoing kid and had a lot of friends to meet and play with.

The main challenge was to engage and participate in class activities that involved reading or answering questions throughout my education years up to my postgraduate level.

I used to dread the reciting of the poems in front of the whole classroom in the literature class at Middle School. But this wasn’t a lost cause because I was a bit of a lazy student when it came to revising anything by heart. The thing is that I got away for far too long with not being picked by the Literature teacher as the selection was done at random.

One day and during the lunch break at home, I learned the first two verses of this poem by heart and thought of a cunning plan to get away with not learning the rest of it.

Back to school and to the Literature class when the teacher started picking one or two students at random and this time I was one of the unlucky ones.

My karma has showed up at the wrong time. I had to stand up in front of the classroom and recite loudly every verse in that poem. I felt my hands sweating profusely and my breathing getting heavier as if careering towards a panic attack. But I had a plan!

Standing up by the whiteboard and facing the class, I started reciting the first word in the verse. That took an eternity before I moved on the next one…another eternity. By the time I finished the first verse, half of the class were dozing off and the teacher was rolling his eyes and discreetly cursing himself for the bad afternoon that had befallen his teaching career.

While I was struggling to remember the first word in the second verse, I was summarily stopped by the teacher and asked to go back to my seat. Sighs of relief were heard across the classroom and the learning process rejoined its normal course.

Feeling exhausted but relieved, I thanked the Gods secretly for their gift of the gab that they never bestowed on me; I’ve finally discovered the power of not being a ‘normal’ person.

Throughout the rest of my life, my stammering kept me away from contributing to discussions with sundry folks and developed in me a resistance against small talk and petty-minded arguments.

I learnt how to argue my case silently and find all the answers without needing anybody else to provide them to me. To the stranger who met me, I looked the laconic and the wise type.

To the people who knew me, the shy and the non-assertive type. It didn’t matter to me at all, I was happy to hide in my own thoughts and ruminations. My condition has changed dramatically in the last few years and I’ve learnt how to control my breathing and my thoughts but, still, I don’t feel totally cured though.

My stammering still manifests itself when I feel terribly stressed or my self-confidence is at its lowest ebb. In any case and whereas we’re not considered disabled people, our struggle to make our voices heard in a noisy environment is no feat but, luckily, there are other ways to talk to people; through the magic of the written word!