About the Author: Michelle Polinsky is a person who stutters who was born, raised, and still based in New York City. She currently works in healthcare but is returning to her roots in arts and performing. She treasures being a part of the stuttering community and is excited to see where her journey takes her next.

The thing about stuttering, is that although it’s complicated and inadvertently changes your life, it’s also not the end of the world. Of course, my opinions are my own and it’s impossible to speak for all of us; we all stutter differently and have different experiences growing up stuttering. Our unique experiences growing up as a person who stutters help shape our worldviews and our relationships with stuttering as we grow up.

I consider myself lucky; I’m lucky that my family has always supported me, that my mom did research and found the resources that were available at the time, that she and my dad took the time to bring me to speech therapy for years, and while I don’t agree with the effectiveness of the techniques I learned, using and understanding them was an important part of understanding what stuttering is, and contributed to my understanding of it now. I’m lucky that I was never discouraged from talking, and I’m so lucky that I met other kids who stutter early on and stuttering was easily integrated into my life. That, when I was a preteen and teenager, a normal Saturday included spending time with my friends who stutter and was full of writing and creating, and music.

My understanding of stuttering was shaped by years of trying to adapt to the fluent world as a person who stutters. I spent years in speech therapy because when a child talks differently, the adults around them want to help them talk normally, or as close to fluent as possible. As a child in speech therapy I learned how to slow down, how to breathe in a way that promotes fluency, how to bounce and stretch out of words, and how to voluntary stutter (which actually did help). When you use techniques, all you’re doing is avoiding an obstacle that’s literally part of your brain. Techniques are band-aids that create a temporary break from a complex disorder that takes years to learn how to manage and live with. Realistically, all the blowing bubbles through a straw and tallying blocks means nothing when it’s only encouraging you to try your best to be fluent, avoid stuttering, which creates more stuttering, and be afraid to say what you want to say. 

When I restarted speech therapy after college, I was in a stuttering rut. I hadn’t really been engaged in the stuttering community for years and the amount of tension in my speech frustrated me to no end. I knew I needed help, but couldn’t express it, and I didn’t want to start from scratch and go back to practicing modification techniques when what was going on in my head was so much more complicated. Since I was a child I’ve worked with multiple speech pathologists. A general speech therapist, two stuttering specialists who used different methods, and graduate students studying speech pathology. When I started my search for a speech pathologist, I didn’t have to search for long, and I found a community that I love. Now I work with a stuttering specialist whom I consider a friend and who has truly helped me grow to be the person I am today. It can take years to find a speech pathologist who has a philosophy you agree with, who you work well with and can trust, because sometimes speech therapy is less about speech and more about therapy. The path that I’ve been on isn’t for everyone, but it allowed me to learn that not every speech pathologist’s methods and philosophies work for everyone. We shouldn’t all have to learn about our own stuttering through trial and error, but when we decide on our own that we need help, we find the community and help we deserve.

It took years for me to decide that I don’t care about fluency, and constantly trying to adhere to the fluent world’s standards of fluency just isn’t worth it. It’s okay that my brain isn’t wired for fluency, because it’s my brain and not anyone else’s. We shouldn’t have to adapt to the fluent world, the fluent world should adapt to our stuttering. We shouldn’t have to jump through so many hoops just because we speak differently. Nothing bad is going to happen if I have a hard block and it takes me longer to say a thought, or a sentence, or even a single word. And nothing is going to explode if I don’t switch to a different word, even though there’s a part of my brain that’s still screaming at me to not stutter, to be fluent, even after all these years. And nothing is going to happen if I block on my name, something that happens every day, because it’s my name and I’m going to stutter on it.