commentr/StutterSeptember 5, 2020

Content

A stutter incident can be perceived as an occasion for entertainment, yes. This requires us to be in a particular setting, and I'm not at all saying that all stutterers automatically are. I would want everyone to be able to see that opportunity, though. So, I'm trying to get away from talking about the act of speaking in only two tracks of evaluation - "stutter bad, fluency good". For me, it's more nuanced, because I don't see only two tracks. I don't think we need to do that. I don't know if you got my point about the act of communication versus the result of the communication. Perhaps you have ideas of your own - and that's not something I have any issue with - but the presentation I made is what I believe to be a possible model of understanding for how we might experience things. My aim is to speak of these things in ways that can help us deal with the position we're in. We don't have to run away from various emotions, or try to discard or suppress them. We can have them, just like we can have various emotions elsewhere in life. So, we can feel bad about stuttering. But that's not all we can feel about it. And we can feel good about being fluent, but that's not all we can feel when we're fluent. We can feel lots of things, regardless of whether we stutter or not. It's difficult to talk about in these different ways, because we all know how awful it was that stutter came about and sat on our lives. But that's not the end point, and we should keep talking and exploring.

Themes

Identity & DisabilityCommunity & Support

Subthemes

Acceptance & PrideAuthenticity vs. MaskingPersonal Stories