About the Author: Michelle Polinsky is a person who stutters who was born, raised, and still based in New York City. She is now in a master of arts program for applied theatre, but still works in healthcare as her day job. She treasures being a part of the stuttering community and is excited to see where her journey takes her next.

People who stutter teach the world the world to listen- that’s true, but it’s also a tall order. People already know how to listen, they just don’t do it very well. Honestly, I have mixed feelings about the phrase; saying that we teach people to listen or have patience is vague and demanding. We do what we can, with who we are. Maybe it’s just existing and communicating with people and stuttering openly. Maybe it’s being willing to discuss stuttering with strangers and being okay with answering the same questions over and over again, being asked if you’ve forgotten your own name, and listening to people suggest that you should sing everything. But not everybody is ready to be that person. We have the ability to teach people to listen and be patient, but it takes time to get to the point in our stuttering journey to be able to actively do that.

I’ve always said that I was lucky, but I wasn’t, I was privileged. I was privileged enough to grow up going to speech therapy (no matter how ineffective), be able to meet other kids who stutter early in my stuttering journey, and be involved in more than one stuttering community growing up. I grew up knowing and spending time with other kids and teenagers who stutter, and I can’t imagine how different I would be if it hadn’t been the case. However, stuttering communities and organizations have separated into age ranges. Some organizations and communities are mainly for kids and teens, others are mainly for kids/teens and their families, and others cater to all, but have separate groups within their own organizations.

When I turned 18, I aged out of the stuttering organization that I had been active in for close to 8 years, basically all my adolescence. Aging out of the community that I had grown to love, it felt like I had in a way lost my family. During my four years in undergrad, my still developing relationship with my stuttering was neglected, and lightly mended during the summer by spending a few weeks back in the arms of my beloved organization before being released back into the fluent world. At that time, unless I was able to find an NSA chapter nearby (that I would have to find transportation to, and I never did make it too a chapter meeting), I didn’t have anyone to talk to about stuttering except for any other student I could find on the tiny campus who stuttered too, and friends in the stuttering community I communicated with sporadically online. The transition to college and then the real world is hard, but it’s even harder without a support system for stuttering.

A person who’s more concerned about fluency is probably far more focused on not stuttering, than they are talking about stuttering as a whole. A child or teenager growing up working with an SLP who doesn’t know much about stuttering may not know how to have an in-depth conversation about the way stuttering makes them feel. Just because we have the unique opportunity, it doesn’t mean we are equipped or willing to teach. It’s a heavy burden to put on people before they are ready, willing, or able to talk about a very complex part of their lives. Look, I’ve always been impatient- with life, and with my own stuttering, and it’s taken a lot of speech therapy to feel differently and be okay with taking up other people’s time- to not be anxious about taking the time I need to say what I want/need to say.

We need to listen to and learn from each other. No parent wants to hear what their child thinks they did wrong when they were growing up, and I’m sure speech therapists don’t like to either. But it’s how we learn and improve, as people, and as a community to help support and create change for the next generations of people who stutter. Support groups as they are right now can only help so much, and the workshops at conferences are the same topics over and over again. Survey the stuttering community to see what people want to learn about and see who is equipped and willing to create and lead workshops about these topics. 

There’s so much I can say about listening and how important it is; how important it is that we advocate for ourselves and demand people listen to us without interruption, how important it is to engage in the stuttering community to amplify our voices, but there’s also so much more to listening. It isn’t just making the world listen to us, we have to listen to each other as well. There is little consensus in the stuttering community; all of our journeys are different, we experience stuttering differently, have different concerns, thoughts, and ideas. So perhaps in order to create the most change, we need to survey the community and find out what the broad concerns are.

I propose that we de-center the idea that we- as people who stutter teach people to listen better, and instead centralize the power of speaking. The power of speaking is for us- our confidence, less anxiety, less struggle, saying what we want/have to say, and teaching people to listen better is a byproduct. I’m speaking for me- I’ll teach people to listen better and be patient if I want to, and through teaching, but I’m speaking for me. The point is, speak for yourself- not to teach (unless you want to). If you’re willing to teach through teaching, teach in a way that suits you. Teach people about stuttering and listening in a format that works for you. There’s so much power in being at a point in your stuttering journey where you aren’t afraid to talk and stutter out loud, where you aren’t focused on rearranging words, where you aren’t diminishing the meaning of your words because you’re afraid to say them. Teach through existing and being yourself; be someone worth listening to, and people will listen.