Is becoming a speech therapist giving back or perpetuating the problem?
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Is becoming a speech therapist giving back or perpetuating the problem? I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my future lately because I’ve been strung between 2 majors in college: engineering or speech pathology. I remember when I was in school as a kid and my mother signed me up for speech therapy. I hated every second of it. All they made me do was read, play these awkward games with the therapist, and practice techniques that just made me think about stuttering more. Maybe this was a personal thing because I always felt I had to overcome my stutter myself. My 2nd year of college has been rough. Class has been in person again and stuttering doesn’t help when I talk to a pretty girl lol. But what I’ve had to do was choose a major and I thought becoming a speech therapist would be a good idea. Then I remember how it made me feel as a kid. Do I want someone else like me to be pulled from a class they find interesting like English, seen as the kid who is different because he’s in speech therapy, feel dumb for having them read? I couldn’t bear that thought. Would I just be contributing to a rough system in schools? Speech therapy is necessary for nonverbal kids, but I wish to be a figure for the stuttering community; hoping to inspire young stutterers with hope that someone like them became a massive success. Maybe doing great things outside of helping directly with speech is the answer. This sounds smart to me, but I’m more venting about my existential crisis. I hope everyone who sees this knows that their stutter should be a motivation, not a hinderance.