*This is my rejected thoughtcatalog submission. Guess I'll try something different. Anyway, hope you dig it.
Growing up I had a really terrible stutter. My words were diced and chopped up so badly that, what in my head seemed like amazing sentences, came out as these mangled glitches of sounds. My Friends could all talk normally, firing off words all fast and sharp, thoughts would form in their brains and travel right down and out the mouth with no issue. My brain would cultivate words and send them out too, but at some point during the trip to my mouth, my words would take a wrong turn and get the shit kicked out of them in an alley. Then they would hobble, all bloodied and beaten, under my pallet and across my tongue and everyone listening would have these pained and pitied looks on their faces. They could tell by the look in my eyes that what I was trying to say was either funny or poignant, but what they heard were just off-putting and static gasps for air and syllable repetition. It was embarrassing to say the (very) least.
The spring time for my speech impediment was during grammar school (Elementary school, as some call it. I never like the term ’elementary’, maybe because of the condescending denotation that Scottish detective says it with.) Children, though unassuming and generally not malevolent, are cruel at this age and I was the subject of much cruelty. Although not as much cruelty as one would think for my stuttering. I was short, near sighted, Pokemon obsessed and had a gnarly case eczema that centralized on my forehead, so the hounds had much to chew on. I was called a midget, four eyes, nerd/lame and Dr. Spots (due to my glasses and the pattern the eczema left on my face.) Although my stutter wasn’t the hot button issue in my social executions, it was the one thing I felt the most ashamed by.
Scientifically speaking, the disorder isn’t tied to any neurological status. Not to say that I’m neurologically sound. I’m on my third bloody Mary and I’m in my boxers wearing the top hat from my Abraham Lincoln Halloween costume. I’m only saying that whatever abnormality exist in my brain doesn’t cause the porky pig routine. But it can cause immense shame, fear, frustration and in my case anxiety. 3 million Americans suffer from stuttering, less than 0.01% of the entire population. Not to mention the fact that four times as many males are suffering from it than females. So my chances of laconically reciting love poems to a girl who knows my plight is massively lowered.
In spite of general ridicule and mild social ostracizing. I was a pretty happy dude. Had my group of friends (nerds and outcasts), got decent grades and had enough gamecube discs at home waiting for me to put that extra fire in my step on the days I’d have to run home with the bullies chased me. I was content in stuttering, and although it shook me up sometimes and caused my hands to pour sweat on the tortuous occasions I was chosen for in class reading it didn’t really stop me from getting a reputation as the funny kid. (Not the class clown, the class clown is never all that funny, he is just the jackass that throws paper at people and pulls your pants down.)
During the latter years of grade school the stuttering halted, I think boobs helped. (The growing of classmates boobs, not my own. I’m a male and if I were to sprout chest protuberances it would open up a whole new galaxy of ridicule and confusion.) Girls began to take their first steps into the grassy field of womanhood and when the boobs started to bloom, the stutter faded out like some evolutionary trait kicked in. And while I still had a multitude of other socially crippling conditions (I was beginning to get dandruff and Digimon had just begin to air on American television.) I found a way to somewhat bury the impediment in order to tell Lindsey Griffin and her gaggle of 12 year old harlots crude jokes and over heard secrets.
Which brings me to the now, I’m 22 and while 8th grade seems like light years away I still bear the scars from my years I spent stuttering. I’m a writer now, and a comedian, I take pride in my words and how they affect people. I still stutter to this day, and it still triggers within me vivid, often horrific flashbacks that send me into chaotic anxiety likened to that off a Vietnam vet. But instead of Ho Chi Min cutting off the ear of a fellow GI, its me reading behind a podium in my social studies class trying, to no avail, to inform the class about Sojourner Truth.
