There’s so much that can be said about the diversity within the stuttering community. If you go to a gathering of people who stutter, you’ll meet people from all walks of life, people from all around the world who do so many different things and live different lives. I’ve met so many different, incredible people; lawyers, doctors, scientists, multiple SLPs who stutter, and we experience stuttering differently. We live with it differently and understand it differently. 

When it comes to stuttering, I’ve never felt alone, but I’ve been lonely. The community lives up to the slogan If you stutter, you’re not alone, but diversity also means that somewhere in the millions of other people who stutter, there are a few people who chose a path like my own. There’s at least one other person who chose to study the same things I did, maybe for similar reasons too, but we’ve taken what we learned and embarked on different paths. And I feel embarrassed that it’s taken me an inordinate amount of time to process and fully articulate the way I feel about this, but it’s lonely when you’ve dreamt of finding people who understand you and jump at the chance to know anyone who might. To be completely honest, growing up as a person who stutters was lonely. Making friends has and probably will always be difficult, and I’ll always wonder if people genuinely want to be friends.

I’m a theatre and music person and grew up performing. I was encouraged to perform in high school and middle school, went to theatre arts camp, majored in theatre arts while in undergrad, and a long, long time ago I was one of the original pre-teens in Ourtime Theatre Company, now called SAY. Theatre and performing gave me a way to express myself and a way to hide. I thought I could be someone other than myself, and then I would agonize over my lines, practice over and over to try to be as fluent as possible, because I cared more about how the words came out of my mouth than the meaning of the words themselves. I just wanted to be heard, wanted my voice to mean something, regardless of what I was saying. 

When I was a senior in high school I asked for a smaller role in a play because I didn’t think I could handle playing a main character. I got the part I wanted, but at what cost? I adopted a new painful kind of perfectionism because I didn’t want to ruin one of the few things I thought I was good at. While I was encouraged and met where I was at in middle and high school, I doubt my undergraduate theatre department knew what to do with me. I tried my absolute best in the few opportunities I had to perform, mostly scene study classes, never actual department shows. When an actor interrupted me when I was reading the stage directions in a play reading, I wanted to scream at him but ended up walking up to him and asking him not to interrupt me again. I remember crying when I couldn’t even get cast in You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown, the only musical that was done while I was there. It’s funny, because I auditioned for and was accepted into two cabaret shows there, so at least they thought I could sing. I don’t have hard feelings though, if I’d been cast in anything my senior year, I wouldn’t have been able to write and perform my capstone project, the first piece I created and performed for myself, not just other people.

So why would a person who stutters do theatre? I’m sure my parents have wondered a few times over the years. My undergraduate theatre department probably wondered why too. I know why I did theatre, or I know why I did it in undergrad. I don’t know exactly why I did it before that, I can only assume because I didn’t write about it until the end of undergrad. As a child it was a way to express myself and create, and as a teenager it became part of my personality. As a young adult, I began to learn about it, and now, I’m using performance to help process my life. The experience of growing up as a person who stutters isn’t ordinary or standard. For me, it came with complex trauma, anxiety, self-doubt, and loneliness. 

I’ve met a few people who chose to study the same things I did and are on similar paths. For a time, I held onto the fact that I’m really not alone, maybe a little too tight. There isn’t a club, even if I wish there was, and we’re all different people who manage and understand our stuttering individually. Maybe one day we’ll create something together, one day far in the future. But right now, there’s no competition, only the quiet understanding that we can advocate separately, quietly or overtly, as ourselves.