'Ambivalent thoughts about my stutter' by Veronica

There are days when I am totally at ease with my stutter and other days where I carry a lot of embarrassment, fear, and shame about my stutter. 

Some days  I can experience an entire range of emotions, both positive and negative, about my stammer. 

And there are a lot of days where I am just ambivalent.

I think my feelings of ambivalence stem from spending a sizeable portion of my life as a covert stutterer while now I am much more overt. But see, I am even ambivalent about that term, ‘ stutterer’ because it describes something I am, but I am so many other things besides a stutterer. Most of the time I identify as a PWS or a person who stammers because it describes stuttering as something I do. Yet, I am completely happy to put myself in the same amazing group as other stutterers. I am unsure of how to describe myself in the context of my stammer.

This is me soothing my soul - I love my garden!

Being covert vs overt;

As a person who was largely covert for most of their life I valued not stuttering, I didn’t really want or aim to be fluent, I just didn’t want to stutter. I had so many negative feelings towards my stammer and yet I totally accepted that it was something I did but I didn’t want anyone to know about it. I knew other people stuttered but I didn’t want to hear them or see them stuttering. I was ashamed of my stammer and at the same time ashamed of myself for being ashamed of a core part of who I am.

And if that seems complicated then try to wrap your head around this,  as I became more overt and I disclosed to people that I did indeed stammer, I wanted them to understand that it was important to me that they acknowledged my stammer while at the same I didn’t want it to matter to them. Sometimes if I disclosed my stutter and people told me it didn’t matter, I found myself confused because I knew it mattered to me.

Do I care about my stammering?

I generally don’t care that I stammer but sometimes I care a lot when I stammer. Sometimes I really care that it bothers me and sometimes I just accept that there are times when it is easier to cope with my stutter.

As you can read, I am even ambivalent about which word to use, stammer or stutter, I tend to use them interchangeably but there was a time in my life when I described blocks as stuttering and hesitancy and repetitions as stammering.

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Further ambivalence; 

I am very clear about certain aspects of my stutter, such as, I do stutter, it is here to stay, we are friends most of the time and we live in harmony, generally speaking. On the other hand I think I have to learn to live with the idea that I am less clear about many aspects of my feelings about my stammer. I guess it illustrates that stuttering is not only a complex neurological condition but it can also have complex, contradictory and confusing emotions attached to it.