I am someone, who from what my parents have told me, started to stutter when I was four years of age. I have to say that I hated having a stuttering problem and was determined that I eventually would be able to have the confidence to say whichever words that I wanted to, in any situation. There were you see a number of words which I believed I just could not say and I also found it difficult to talk when I felt under pressure. After living with the stutter for eighteen years, I finally managed to achieve fluency and life has never been so good. It is like having a weight lifted from my shoulders. Many people who stutter find that it can, in a way, rule their whole lives. Every decision they take seems to be affected by the speech impediment. For example, I decided to leave school because of my own stutter. My life at school was made so much harder by being unable to converse fluently. In fact I used to fear going to school, this was mainly because I was scared that I would be asked to read out aloud from a book or would be asked a question in front of the whole class. I will never forget when I attempted to take part in a role play in an English lesson, I was a complete nervous wreck and had a terrible time. When I was at home, a place where I should be relaxed, I used to be afraid of the telephone of all things. Fluent people may well think that I am crazy from some of the things that I am admitting to in this article. On the other hand, I am sure other people who have a stutter may identify with some of the issues that I was trying to deal with on a daily basis. Going back to the telephone, there were many times when the phone would start to ring and I would just ignore it and not answer it. My parents would return home a little while later and would see that someone has perhaps left a message. They would enquire as to why I had not answered the call, I would reply with some excuse such as that I had popped out to the shops. As you can see I basically had a fear of stuttering and during this period I would do anything to avoid stuttering. To overcome the speech impediment I was willing to do anything to beat it. |
