About the Author: Andrea Callegaro is an Italian teacher of philosophy, history, and geography. Originally from Padua, Italy, he now lives and works in Tours, France. He is 35 years old. Andrea describes himself as someone who stutters, and he considers this an important part of his identity. In his free time, he enjoys reading, hiking, cooking, and attending concerts.

1
I can’t remember when I started stuttering. But I do remember sitting on my mother’s lap, as she gently but firmly reminded me of the instructions: “Calm down, breathe, speak properly”. My family thought I was imitating a friend of my grandparents, an elderly man who stuttered. His name was Bepi and, in a small village in the deep countryside of north-eastern Italy, he was considered a freak. They wondered if I was copying him, if I was making fun of him, as everyone else did.

At some point, a teacher must have suggested speech therapy. I remember the office: large windows, a wide and tidy desk. I sat next to my mother, who was then asked to wait outside. A smiling lady with bouffant hair asked me to read something, to describe some images. I don’t remember what I said or how I said it.

Then my mother came back in. There was a brief and tense exchange, uncertain looks, my mother seemed confused and frustrated. I felt I had disappointed their expectations. Back home, the announcement to my father: “Andrea doesn’t stutter.” I remember the confusion and disbelief. My father protested, my mother insisted she had done everything possible. But the decision had been taken: a professional had spoken. And that was enough.

2
Years passed. I was in middle school and my father had just been promoted from postman to clerk. One day I met one of his new colleagues, Roberta: elegant yet easy-going, she soon became a close friend of my parents. She often asked about me, and we would talk for hours on the phone: about school, friends, football, music.
One summer afternoon, while I was playing PlayStation, my mother asked: “Roberta suggested a speech therapist. Would you like to try?” The question came out of nowhere. I froze. I felt exposed, vulnerable. I answered: “No, I don’t need it. Stuttering isn’t a problem for me.”

A few days later, I had my first session with Rita. She lived in a Venetian villa, shaded by a huge weeping willow. She had an old Renault and a dog with long ears and cloudy eyes, now almost blind. Rita was retired and welcomed me out of affection for Roberta, her former patient.

I saw her for three or four years, with irregular sessions. We met in the bedroom that had belonged to her grandson, sitting side by side at a desk, in front of a fireplace. The room smelled faintly of ashes and wood smoke. After each session, she would make tea and offer me biscuits. If the weather was nice, we waited for my father in the garden, under the willow tree.

Rita taught me to tap my thumb against my fingers to keep rhythm, to paraphrase, to find synonyms, to release air slowly before speaking. We read aloud, weaving sentences into sing-song melodies. She told me to “link the words,” to “breathe with my diaphragm,” to “avoid those difficult sounds.” And she also cared for me, for my adolescent anxieties and fears. She listened without judgment, made me feel understood. Her gentle and reassuring gaze calmed me in ways I could not explain. She passed on to me a love for reading, and in part it is thanks to her that I am a teacher today.

3
I look back on those years with a mixture of tenderness and unease. On the one hand, care, comfort, affection; on the other hand, an invisible discipline that still haunts me, whispering that my voice must be controlled, my breath managed, my body contained, my identity masked.

I wonder if there are other ways of looking at my voice, my silences, my repetitions, my movements, my body. Ways that do not reduce everything to the language of pathology and disorder, defect and deficit, and that can help me see beyond diagnosis, therapy, treatment, cure, rehabilitation. This vocabulary falls like boulders – huge, insurmountable – crushing me into silence, leaving me breathless, unable to reply. But, after all, no response is even expected. These words fail to capture the complexity of my experience; they do not help me to name the world I inhabit, to move among its obstacles, to imagine it differently.

What remains are questions, still unresolved: are we, people who stutter, learning to pronounce a different language? Are we creating concepts that resonate with our experience, that embrace our pauses, our lives, our stories? Do we have the tools to choose, consciously, whether and which therapies to follow, and to uncover the values that underlie them? And above all, how can we reclaim our narratives and our voices, without letting others define them for us?