Speech Impairment

One particular personal issue I have struggled with throughout my life has been a speech impairment. At the age of 5, I began to stutter. It progressively got worse as the years went on. Finally, it got so bad around age 10 that my parents sent me to a 3 month intensive program which was about 40 hours per week. This program helped me tremendously. It has been 13 years since I attended the program. Though I still stutter (it is impossible to cure), it is no where near as bad as it once was when I was younger. In fact, many people are surprised when I tell them that I stutter because I am fluent probably 90% of the time. I have learned different techniques and built up my self-esteem, so that helps out my confidence and therefore my fluency.

Stuttering becomes a social issue for the majority of stutterers. Constantly, we are plagued with our biggest fear of speaking in public or put into situations which make us nervous and more susceptible to disfluency. This has caused many severe stutterers to become outcasts and drive themselves as far away from society as possible. This is what causes a good chunk of society to begin to place a label on stutterers and use this image when depicting in movies, books, and the general media. Thankfully, I have never driven myself away from others and I have always been just as social, despite my insecurities.

A common misconception about people who stutter is that they are mentally handicapped or disabled. This is completely untrue as many people already know. People who stutter have the same intellectual capacity as people who do not. In fact, many stutterers become great writers because they know it is one of the only ways they can communicate 100% clearly. My ongoing plan has and always will be to disprove the general assumptions placed upon those with speech impairments and show that we are just as normal as everyone else, but have the tendency to struggle with verbal communications.