by Teresa Antoinette

Created on: May 17, 2010

I've thought about it a lot. Why I write. And the only reason I can ever think of is that I write to express myself properly.  

Growing up is hard. Throw in a stutter to the blazing, ever-changing world of adolescence and growing up is a misery.  

My story is one that is begging to be told.  I grew up believing that my stutter was something to either A) be ashamed of because there was no communication about it (IRONY at its mother-f-ing finest), or B) something to be laughed at.  Everyone laughed at it when we weren't all trying our hardest to pretend it didn't exist. Myself especially. 

I was equally horrified and relieved when someone would finish a sentence for me.  When I couldn't get a word out, I died inside each time.  But then the sentence would be over, and the ordeal would be over (until next time) and we could all go on acting as if things were normal.  That's where the relief came from if only temporary. 

My stutter was a mirror that held itself up, shoved its presence into my vision and reminded me of my blatant imperfect humanness.  Of course I knew and know that everyone is imperfect, perfection is impossible and blah blah.  When you are 13 years old and standing in front of your entire eighth grade english class, being asked to read aloud and you might as well be naked up there for how vulnerable and terrified you feel, you are a different kind of imperfect, period.  When you are the only student that stutters in an entire school, you are the alien.  The collective weirdness of being a teenager is what feels trivial.  

And so, I write to express myself.  Because sometimes when I do it verbally, it doesn't come out the way I want or need it to. I have always written.  It is what has saved me, what has revealed myself to me.  What has kept me going when I wanted to give up most, I suppose. 
When I let go of what other people may or may not think of me when they find out I stutter, I feel freest.  Most like myself.  When I focus on what stuttering has taught me, instead of what it has robbed me of, I feel happiest. Calmest. Most hopeful.  That kind of freedom hasn't come easily.  

When I was a kid, I would lay awake before bed urging God, bargaining with God, pleading, weeping into my pillow asking God to please please please take my stutter away.  Please.  I was eleven and then I was twelve and then one day I turned sixteen

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