Stuttering

I have a dirty little secret. I stutter. I do my best to hide it.

It’s not severe and most of the time it doesn’t bother me. It’s kind of like hiccups – mildly embarrassing and super annoying, but doesn’t really interfere with quality of life.

At one point, when I was a teenager, the stuttering got pretty bad. It was soon after we came to the US, so was probably caused by a combination of stress and new language. Answering the phone was a torture. Family friends recommended speech therapy. It didn’t cure the stutter but it helped with some other things. After some months, it got better. The more comfortable I felt speaking English, the more fluent I was, the less I stuttered. Interestingly, when I was taking German in college, I would stutter terribly when trying to speak German in class. Now-a-day, I stutter more in Russian than in English (probably because I find it easier to speak English, even though Russian is my native language...).

I do my best to avoid stuttering. I can participate in a conversation and all that, no problem, especially if I can get away with one- or two-word responses (“That’s fantastic!” “Oh, no!!!” “Really?” “How interesting!!!”). 

Except every once in a while, a word gets stuck. I usually can sense what’s coming and quickly substitute with a more comfortable word. Like saying “ahhh, this is great!” instead of “t-t-t-t-tasty”. What kills me is when I get stuck on my name. So when someone asks “And what is your name” and I stare back at them and it’s kind of mortifying because I know I am going to have to stutter through it. It’s unpleasant, embarrassing, and probably looks super-weird. Sometimes, I do say “Sorry, I stutter, I got stuck on my name. I am not trying to be purposefully weird.”

It really annoys me when people assume that I stutter because I am nervous. Most of the time, I don’t stutter when introducing myself (but I do tend to start with “Hi, I am Natasha” instead of just saying “Natasha”). I just stutter, nervous or not. When I read to my kids, when I speak to my friends. Not constantly, just every once in a while, a minor “Once upon a t-t-time”. It’s just that some pathway in my brain responsible for language is a little "off".

Annoying. 

But certainly not the end of the world.