Written after noticing I still hold my breath before certain letters.
For the first two and a half years of my life, I spoke like a bird. I have no memory of that ease, but I know it once existed. And I know exactly when it vanished.
One day, I began to stutter.
There was no in-between. No gentle fade from fluency to difficulty. It felt sudden, like a fracture. Like a switch flipped in my nervous system, or like something in me got the message: “You’re not supposed to say that.” Or maybe even: “You’re not supposed to speak at all.” My voice became something I now had to negotiate with. I wouldn’t say that made me stop speaking completely. At some point, it felt safer to stop speaking than to risk the shame of stuttering. Conversations became calculations, and silence became my default. I didn’t disappear, but I did shrink.
I remember feeling ashamed of the words sitting in my mouth. Ashamed of my own voice, my own sentences. I wasn’t just embarrassed that I couldn’t say something—I felt like what I wanted to say was already wrong before it ever left me. That kind of shame doesn’t just affect your speech. It seeps into how you perceive yourself. It wraps itself around your throat and calls itself personality.
The more ashamed I felt, the more I stuttered. The more I stuttered, the more ashamed I became. It fed itself.
By the time I was four and a half, I developed my first eczema flare. Again, nothing out of nowhere. I feel like my body was speaking for me when my voice couldn’t. That constant itch, that inflammation was my skin’s way of saying “I am not safe.” It covered my whole body. At six, I started kindergarten. I was afraid of people. I remember the fear clearly. Actually, I was afraid of boys.
Despite it all, something tried to heal. In elementary school, my father began reading with me every night. For hours. We would spend hours going through books together. Sentence by sentence. Page by page. His patience, his love, his time—they all helped me reclaim something. Something as simple, and as profound, as my voice.
Now, as an adult, my speech is mostly fine. But sometimes, when stress hits me hard enough, it starts to resurface. Not like it used to—but it’s there. Lurking. Waiting.
It doesn’t take over completely, but it starts to push up against my ability to hide it. And the worst part? I still try to mask it. I still feel that same tension in my throat when I have to force a smooth sentence out, knowing it doesn’t want to come. The breath I hold to stay in control catches in my neck like a swallowed scream.
Lately, I can’t even mask it anymore. I fail when I try, and the people around me can tell. They slightly notice the glitch in my speech. The pause. The breath that doesn’t land right. When they do, that old shame floods back in just like it used to.
What if my stuttering was my earliest form of protest?
What if it was my body’s first attempt at saying:
“Something is wrong. Please listen.”
If this stress level resonates with you, you might also enjoy Why Do I See Violent Gore in My Dreams While Actively Trying to Relax?
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