About the Author: Michelle Polinsky is a stuttering self-advocate and theatre enthusiast, born, raised, and still based in New York City. She is in her final year as a graduate student in the MA in Applied Theatre program at Hunter College and still works in healthcare as her day job. She treasures being a part of the stuttering community and is eager to use what she’s learning to benefit the stuttering community.

I can’t say that stuttering didn’t shape my life, because it would be a complete lie, and saying that the experience of stuttering has and still does shape my life is an understatement, because sometimes it’s the only thing in my life I’m 100% certain of. The experience of stuttering is so entwined in my life, that I don’t know who I would be, or what I would be doing with my life if I didn’t stutter. If you ask me the magic pill question, if there was a magical pill cure for stuttering, would I take it, I wouldn’t take it. I’ve spent too long learning to live with stuttering, that I can’t imagine not stuttering, no matter how much not stuttering might positively impact my life. It frustrates me, and sometimes I wish that so much of my life didn’t revolve around stuttering. 

Unfortunately, my life does partially revolve around stuttering, and although I’ve learned to live with it, there have been times that I’ve tried to talk about it less in an effort to not let it consume every aspect of my life. But the truth is, I need to talk about it, even if it makes me feel like I’m oversharing or talking too much about myself. Talking about stuttering is more than just talking about myself, it’s also talking about the complex experience of stuttering and everything that comes with it, and it’s vulnerable. It’s easy to talk about the basics of what stuttering is, but not always what it does to a person who grows up stuttering. It isn’t easy to talk about the period of time when I was a kid where I didn’t want to talk much, or growing up watching people’s reactions to me talking. Or feeling like a burden because my parents spent the time and money taking me to speech therapy for so many years, even when it didn’t help, or helped for a little while and then didn’t anymore. Or feeling broken, or anxious, because trying not to stutter makes you stutter more. That stuttering modification techniques are like band-aids, and they remind me of when I went to sleepaway camp, when I would scratch and pick at every mosquito bite and end up with band-aids on my arms and legs for weeks. But band-aids aren’t a cure, they are a temporary covering while whatever is under them heals, and scabs don’t heal if you keep picking at them.

Thankfully, with time comes understanding. Better yet, over the years, I’ve reflected on the impact stuttering has had on my life, and the impact I would like to make in the stuttering community. I’ve realized that I can track my understanding of/and connection to stuttering over the years by the ways I’ve chosen to share information about it, along with my readiness to disclose to people that I stutter. In 7th or 8th grade, I co-led an assembly at my middle school about stuttering with Taro Alexander. In my senior year of high school, I gave a presentation about stuttering in biology class. When I was in undergraduate school, I made sure to disclose in all of my classes that I stutter, and my senior capstone in the theatre department was a one-woman play where I lamented that I was afraid that I would have to be a waitress after I graduated. Thankfully I didn’t have to be a waitress, but I found myself in new environments where I had to learn that telling people that I stutter is at the same time one of the most important, and least important responsibilities I have to myself as a person who stutters. I never envisioned myself having a corporate job, but it forced me to become more comfortable 

Then my cabaret show, where I couldn’t find a song that truly captured the experience of stuttering, so I wrote one. And now graduate school, an environment I chose to enter on my own terms, with a joke about not having voldemort on the back of my head, and where my identity as a person who stutters is an asset, not a barrier. During my first semester, I was able to incorporate an exercise that demonstrates how classical conditioning can affect speech patterns, especially in people who stutter, into a presentation on behaviorism. It allowed my classmates to experience a little bit of the conditioned anxiety that I face every day, even though they don’t stutter themselves.

When I was younger, stuttering shaped my path and brought opportunities I might not have had otherwise. Even today, I wonder if the spaces I occupy were won by my actual talents, or if they were just compassionate gifts. Sometimes I wonder if that is still my reality, or if I’ve finally earned my seat through my own experience, insight, and knowledge. Today, the work I’m doing in graduate school is a direct continuation of the path I started on when I was a pre-teen doing improv and learning how to collaborate and create space for other people’s voices and ideas. My stuttering journey is ongoing, and there are still things that I’m exploring and coming to terms with, like, right now I’m interested in the social model of disability, and over the last few years, I’ve talked more than I ever thought I would (or could), and there’s much more to communicating with other people than I ever imagined. Stuttering doesn’t completely define me, it isn’t the most interesting or important thing about me, and it isn’t the end of the world.