About the Author: My name is Finnian Galbraith and I’m a person who stutters from Aotearoa-New Zealand. The international stuttering community is relatively new territory for me but I’m a big advocate for us stutterers speaking up and sharing our experiences however we can and see fit. I’m a Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Technician by trade, as well as an Anthropology and Japanese graduate (peculiar combination I know!). In my spare time, you can find me out on the football field, writing or DJing.

Aotearoa, New Zealand. Right down in the bottom corner of the world, easy to leave off the map (this happens often, it’s quite funny). My country is covered in national parks, filled with mountains, beaches and trails far from cell towers where you can lose yourself for days. There are more sheep than people- more than four times as many. You can stroll the city streets of Wellington, the capital, and 15 minutes later be surrounded by beautiful native bush, completely alone. It’s the perfect place to be a covert stutterer.

Standing out from the crowd is heavily frowned upon here, especially if you’re trying to flex (we call this tall poppy syndrome, comparing high achievers to flowers growing taller than others in a field). I generally like this about my country. The average Kiwi is down-to-earth, easygoing and (somewhat) humble, all attributes we really value. It’s this attitude that allows for our former prime minister to drop a set at our biggest New Years music festival, and for a flag with a kiwi bird shooting a laser out of its eye to nearly win the popular vote in our flag referendum- brilliant.

But there are some drawbacks. [Not standing out] can often mean [hiding difference]. Our proud ‘do it yourself’ mentality doesn’t leave much room for acknowledging successes nor vulnerabilities. We talk down our achievements for fear of being egotistic, we talk down our struggles for fear of being a burden. Of course I was going to hide my stutter.

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I’m 9 years old. My sticker chart, stuck to the fridge, gets another gold star every time I say something fluently and my mum acknowledges it with a ‘good smooth talking’. This is therapy. 50 stars by the end of the month and I get a new football- awesome. I’ve done the math and know exactly how many times I have to not stutter per day to get the job done. It’ll be tight but I back myself. I won’t let a few bumps get in the way of the shining prize, right? But a couple nights of bad sleep and resulting dysfluencies push back my progress. I get anxious calculating my growing required fluency rates and a snowball picks up some momentum. What a surprise. April ends and I’ve only hit 40-something stars.

Although my primary concern at that time was not getting a shiny new ball to kick into the nets at the local park, something deeper was kickstarted by the sticker chart. Stuttering=no football and no football=bad. Therefore, stuttering=bad. Simple logic. Throw in a couple of not-so-fun experiences stuttering in front of my laughing classmates at school and I’ve got a pretty strong narrative cooking in my head. My stutter is a clear point of difference, something I get pulled out of class once a week to go and have ‘fixed’. On the playground, being different or ‘weird’ can leave you playing alone. So my half-spoken comments become ‘never mind’s and I become a pro at swapping words and pretending not to know. I frequently choose silence over dysfluency, a choice which forms the basis of my stuttering today. 

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The Te Reo Māori (NZ’s indigenous language) word for stutter is ‘kikikiki’. One of the sounds my stutter loves the most is a hard ‘k’. This is a less than ideal (but pretty humourous) combination. When my well-trained early warning system detects a near certain stutter like this incoming, I run a calculation in my head. Do I say what I originally wanted to say, stutter and risk negative reactions? Or do I substitute, avoid, pause, slur- whatever is required- to hide my stutter, to appear fluent, to appear ‘normal’ for this moment? 

Think of it like a set of scales. On one side sit the weights of speaking freely, the other weighed down by social conformity and fear. Open stuttering and covert stuttering. My scales tipped towards the covert side early on, thanks in large part to a certain sticker chart, and I’ve been adding weights to that side ever since. Greater awareness of the tall poppy mindset, a tendency for Kiwi men to hide vulnerabilities (especially in the construction industry, where I work), further occasional but influential negative experiences- all pushing the scales firmly down into covert territory. I’ve got an impressive collection of reasons not to stutter and not much stands in opposition.

And the more I choose to hide my stutter, the better I get at doing just that. I’ve become very good at passing as fluent, and most people in my life don’t know I have a stutter, a badge I wear with pride. This means that my ‘to stutter or not to stutter’ equation has become increasingly easy to solve, to the point where it is more or less subconscious. It feels like far less effort to hide my stutter than it would be to face the consequences of not. Being covert is second nature.

Tipping the scales back the other way has always felt like an impossibility. Sure, my mind is frequently filled with potential ‘reasons to stutter’-  avoiding the mental toll of constantly forward-planning and rerouting sentences, revealing my own vulnerabilities to encourage others to open up about theirs, maybe being more ‘true to myself’. I can theorise for hours and conclude that stuttering openly is the best way forward, only for that to be instantly outweighed in reality. No amount of principled thought seems to stack up to the fear and shame that appears in practice. Something pretty major is required to overcome this dilemma: I need a damn good reason to stutter.

And maybe I’ve found that. Last year, I stumbled on to a stutter-positive article, one thing led to another and I found myself amongst an international stuttering community. Standing in a room talking with other people who stutter, in the majority, is a surreal feeling. The level of mutual understanding is wild- these people ‘get it’ like no one else could. Shared experiences fill every conversation and social fears begin to fade. 

For the first time in my life, my stutter wasn’t a potential ticket to exclusion but the opposite, the exact reason for my acceptance. This made the covert equation in my head a little less straight-forward. Suddenly, the weight of potential social exclusion and shame was a whole lot lighter, the weight of standing out like a tall poppy all but gone. My scales shifted and I found myself, at times, stuttering openly for perhaps the first time since early childhood. I felt free in my speech, a simply incredible feeling- way better than a gold star on a sticker chart.

It’s also a weird feeling. My scales have been stuck in the same position for years, growing rusty, so it’s hardly going to be a smooth switch from covert to open stuttering. Just letting a stutter happen feels like a brand new concept for my brain, like I’m having to relearn the way I approach social situations. Exciting, but challenging.

And going ‘back to reality’ after being amongst a stuttering community saw my scales flip right back- staunchly covert once again. The pressures of conformity and the tall poppy mindset remain strong, ingrained in my mind. Hiding my stutter is a near integral part of my identity and it will take time to reverse this mindset outside of a clear stutter-positive environment.

But finding the stuttering community and their different shades of stuttering has given me a glimpse of an alternative outcome to my daily equation, one that better aligns with the principles in my head. It was a taste of freedom from worrying about how I was being perceived, and the mental load of constantly thinking ahead and changing my sentences. Most importantly, it was a strong awareness that I’m not alone as I try to balance my scales. I’m one of literally millions of intelligent, creative, beautiful, driven and unbelievably kind people worldwide who happen to have a stutter. There’s an immense sense of pride and inspiration that comes from finding that sort of connection. And that’s a bloody good reason to stutter.

He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people. 

(Māori proverb)