About the Author: My name is Kory Tran and I’m a person who stutters in the Bay Area. Well, I suppose I’m a person who stutters outside the Bay Area as well. I grew up in a small town called San Jose, California. I am a UX designer/writer with a background in journalism and creative writing. This is my second year participating in the ISAD conference. I am also active in the National Stuttering Association as the co-chapter leader of the South Bay/Silicon Valley chapter.

I’ve always been the only person in my family tree that’s been known to stutter. I was the stuttering sheep of the family, you could say. So growing up, my parents didn’t know how to help me, and they desperately wanted to help me, which to them meant eliminating my stutter so I could be a “normal,” productive member of society. You see, I grew up in California in the ’90s where sticking out was terrifying, especially if you have an immigrant background. Quelle horreur!

Stuttering, at least in my corner of the world, was an obscure thing at the time, and also the Internet was not widely available, so my parents clung onto the bits and pieces of advice about stuttering they heard from friends or co-workers. “Just slow down.” “Think more deeply about what you want to say.” I remember the day I got home from school and my dad sat me down and told me he had some really important news to share. 

In a grave voice, he said, “I heard that reading horror stories causes one to stutter.” I rolled my eyes. My penchant for reading “Goosebumps” at the time was well-known. (As I said, this was the ’90s). And my well-meaning dad’s theory, which I guess he had heard from somebody who knew somebody, was that horror stories induced such a state of fright in people that it made them unable to speak fluently. Even as a kid, I thought this idea was laughable. 

At the same time, it also made me frustrated at the lack of well-known information on stuttering. I thought, we can put a man on the moon, but we can’t find a fix for this thing that causes other kids to make fun of me. And I like to think that me being self-conscious about my stutter was a little more important than landing on the moon.

At school, I was also the only kid I knew who stuttered. Because of my dad’s job, I switched schools often, so I could never get used to a school speech therapist for long. The speech therapists ranged from wonderful to not very knowledgeable. At one of the last elementary schools I attended, I was assigned a speech therapist who didn’t seem to know much about stuttering. She pulled me from class just to participate in mundane activities with kids who were challenged in very different ways. I think maybe the school didn’t really know what to do with me, so they probably thought, He’s different, let’s pull him out and put him with the different kids. (Did I mention this was the ’90s? It was practically the wild west back then.) After that experience, I declined to attend speech therapy in school again.

It wasn’t until my mid-20s that I decided to revisit acknowledging the stuttering elephant in the room. So I dropped into a meeting of the local National Stuttering Association chapter. I’m not sure what I expected…maybe a room full of folks who spoke like me? What I found was a group of people whose voices had a familiar stutter and yet were still pretty different from my own. Some people sounded covert or nearly fluent. Some spoke with a lot of repetition, and some had blocks like I did. I was beginning to see why there couldn’t be such a simple “cure.” There were so many different ways to stutter!

Also, people had different ways in which they viewed their stutter and dealt with it. Some people felt that their stutter was severe and significantly hindered them, while others didn’t feel really affected by their stutter. Some people used word replacement to mask their stutter while others insisted on stuttering openly. Later I started attending the NSA conference where hundreds of people who stutter gather annually, and I noticed countless more variations on how people stutter, feel about it and deal with it in their lives. And therein lies why it’s not so easy to find a common “fix” for stuttering.

I think this may be one of the most misunderstood and challenging things about explaining to others what it is to be a person who stutters. As an NSA chapter leader now, I have met many people who come to a meeting for the first time, seeking a road map. Some people want to hear, You should do this, then do this, then this, then you’ve got your stutter under control and you could be the lawyer your parents always wanted you to be. But a more helpful message I think would be, You got this. We are all different. And we are here to support and cheer you on to be you.

This year, I spoke with a parent of a child who stutters. She said that although she fully embraces her child as a person who stutters, part of her will always wish that life could be easier for her child. And it made me think of my own parents. Sure, over the years, my parents gave me advice on stuttering that was not always helpful or relevant. At times, I got frustrated at how little they understood me and my stutter. But I believe now that my parents did the best they could with the limited knowledge they had. My mom has come a long way from trying to eliminate my stutter (my dad unfortunately passed away more than a decade ago). Occasionally, she might say something like, “Wow, in this speech you can hardly tell Joe Biden stutters at all. Maybe you can look up his techniques.” And I would gently remind her that people stutter differently, and people handle it in different ways. One size does not fit all…and that’s OK.