A Personal Message for Teens

 

 

When I was a teenager almost seventy years ago the future sure looked bleak. I was a very severe stutterer with many long hard blockings accompanied by facial contortions and head jerks that not only provoked rejection by my listeners but also made it almost impossible for me to communicate. I’d had therapy at a stutterer’s institute, gained a bit of temporary fluency, then relapsed and was worse than I’d been before. Only once had I asked a girl for a date and her answer was, “I’m not that hard up.” Recitation in school was so frustrating to myself, my classmates and the teacher that I rarely said a word. Strangers, watching me try to talk, thought I was either epileptic or crazy. Those years were dark ones.

 

But the worst part of them was that I felt not only helpless but hopeless. How was I ever to get a job or to be able to support myself? How was I ever to get married and raise a family? I felt naked in a world full of steel knives. I thought of suicide and tried it once but failed at that too.

 

If a fortune teller back then had predicted that I would have a wonderful and rewarding life I would have laughed in her face, bitterly. But, despite my stuttering, or even because of it, I have such a life, and you can, too. Now, at eighty two years of age, I can look back at those years with a sense of fulfillment. I had a fascinating job that helped me pioneer a new profession. I married a lovely woman, had three children and nine grandchildren, all of whom gave me the love I hungered for but never expected to get. I made a lot of money from the many books I wrote. I made films, TV and radio appearances; I gave speeches to large audiences and gave lectures all over this country and in many foreign lands. I’ve had everything I wanted and more. In my old age I am content.

 

Surely I must have been cured of my stuttering to do all those things? No, I’ve stuttered all my days. I guess I’m one of those incurable stutterers. Everyone has his own personal demon and mine is stuttering. So is yours. I found that once I accepted it as a problem and learned to cope with it by not avoiding or hiding or struggling with it, my demon lost its hold on me. If I feared stuttering I talked anyway. If others rejected me because of it, well, to hell with them! I stopped fighting myself when I stuttered; I learned to stutter easily and when I did so I became fluent enough to accomplish anything I set out to do.

 

I’ve known hundreds of stutterers who managed to live equally satisfying lives despite their stuttering. Among them have been laborers, preachers, teachers, lawyers, even an auctioneer. The one characteristic they had in common was that they didn’t let their stuttering prevent them from talking.

 

So there is hope for you too, my friend.