About the Author: Hi! 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 am an aspiring UX designer/writer with a background in journalism. My work has appeared in the Mercury News as well as the American Drivel Review journal of literary humor. I am currently active in the National Stuttering Association as the co-chapter leader of the South Bay/Silicon Valley chapter.

There is a TV show I like called “The Blacklist.” One day I watched an episode where the main character is abducted by a group of road bandits, one of whom, T-Bone, has a noticeable stutter. I waited for T-Bone’s stutter to factor into the storyline. I figured, there has to be a specific reason this character stutters, right? The plot will hinge on his stutter somehow. Or the other characters will make fun of his stutter to emphasize the depth of their villainy. But by the end of the episode, I was surprised—the apparent stutter was never mentioned. To me, this was groundbreaking. But also, I wondered why something so simple was groundbreaking.

For a significant part of my life, I worried that having a stutter would define me. “Oh that’s Kory,” I imagined they’d say, “That’s the guy who stutters.” I was worried I wouldn’t have personality traits independent of my stutter. 

A stutter was something I felt I had to minimize, or be in denial about. “Oh I didn’t stutter. I just didn’t know the right words to say.” “Oh I didn’t stutter, I just wasn’t sure how to pronounce this.” Having a stutter just seemed so negative. I wanted to sweep it under the rug, throw some furniture on the rug, and then stand in front of the furniture saying, “Hey hey! There’s nothing to see here!”

By my junior year of college, I thought I had kind of hidden my stutter. I thought, if I were a Google search, the word “stutter” would be buried on the third page of my search results.

Then one day a classmate said to me, “I think it’s so cool and brave that you’re majoring in journalism even though you stutter. Honestly, if I had a stutter, I wouldn’t know how I’d deal.” At that moment, the carefully crafted image of myself as a person who didn’t let my stutter bother me came crashing down. My classmate might have intended the comment as a compliment or an offhand remark, and yet I felt the sting…that no matter what I did in life, I would always carry the stigma of a person who stutters.

When it came to journalism, I became hyper-aware of my stutter and I dreaded the reporting work—making cold calls, approaching people I didn’t know, winning sources’ trust enough to garner information from them. Once, as a student correspondent for a major newspaper, I interviewed a veteran reporter and blocked many times. Afterward, the veteran reporter offered me tips on how to relax and sound more confident, she said, “so that people will take you seriously as a reporter.” She was aiming to be kind, but afterward I wondered if people would ever take me seriously as a reporter. When I was transcribing my recorded interviews, my stutter was all I could hear. 

Now, this is the point in the essay where you’re probably thinking, “Wait, where is the inspirational part? I came here for an uplifting read and it just seems to get worse and worse. What wonderful event happened that turned everything around for you?!”

Well…a fairy godmother didn’t appear out of the blue and say, “Bibbidi bobbidi boo. Congratulations, your stutter no longer bothers you.”

But when things get really low, when you feel like you’ve hit the bottom, there’s nowhere to go but up. I threw out the furniture, lifted up the rug and admitted to myself that my stutter was still there. Once I accepted that this stutter was here to stay and that it was OK, it seemed much less imposing.

I joined the National Stuttering Association, where I met people who asked me to stop apologizing every time I had a block. I joined Toastmasters where I discovered, surprisingly, that a lot of people wanted to hear what I had to say, even if it took me a bit longer to say it.

In the past, I would often avoid telling jokes in case I’d have a block on the punchline. I would also avoid arguments in case my stutter appeared to undermine my credibility. But those avoidances prevented people from getting to know me. Now, if people dislike me, I hope it’s just because I’m a terrible person.

Are things much easier now? Not always. As I am pursuing my new career in UX (User Experience), sometimes those old concerns still creep in, like: If I stutter during an interview or a presentation, would that make me seem unsure of what I’m saying? Would they be more inclined to hire someone who could speak with more ease? People in the industry are so confident, how do I make myself heard? 

But to make a long story shorter, and also because this essay does have a word count limit, I learned that having a stutter didn’t prevent me from having other qualities. Instead of having a stutter or being funny, I could stutter and be funny, weird, imaginative, and many other adjectives. 

Having representation in the media helps. “The King’s Speech” is the example a lot of people cite when they talk about stuttering. But I’m more eager for examples like “The Blacklist” where if a character has a stutter, it wouldn’t necessarily be a plot point. The more that a stutter is normalized and not portrayed as harrowing or quirky, the easier it gets for people like me to show our other qualities, our other personality traits.

In addition to being a person who stutters, I’m also a person who dances awkwardly, a person who dislikes running, a person who can be shy and outgoing on the same day. And a person who watches “The Blacklist.”