Seizing What Could Be
This is the third article in a series of posts chronicling my journey through audiobook production, from conception to publication on Amazon Audible. In this article, I write about the rest of my training prior to beginning to record. It describes a walk-in-my-shoes through my daily morning reading sessions, progress and setbacks, and personal feedback
Today, I will stand before an audience of over 100 people and deliver the best man speech at my brother’s wedding. Let this reality sink, and realize before it happens that it will be an earthquake moment in my life. A moment that, for many, many years, I have feared and thought impossible. But, one
This is the second article in a series of posts chronicling my journey through audiobook production, from conception to publication on Amazon Audible. In this article, I write about my training efforts to build up my stuttering and communicative endurance so that I can record the audiobook in its entirety. It will include descriptions of
This is the first article in a series of posts chronicling my journey through audiobook production, from conception to publication on Amazon Audible. In this initial article, I share my inner conflict over whether I am physically capable of narrating my full memoir because of my stutter. And, if I do, how I can ensure
I take it for granted. I have no shame anymore. I can walk into every situation and disclose that I stutter without regard for the response. I’m not arrogant. I’m honoring the journey that it took to get here. Self-disclosure is not unique to stuttering but an invaluable skill that we must learn to attain social competency.
Perhaps I have not read enough of the available academic research done on stuttering to date, or that which I have read has not been as accessible as Knowledge Without Action Means Nothing: Stakeholder Insights on the Behaviors that Constitute Positive Change for Adults Who Stutter conducted by Dr. Naomi Rodgers and Dr. Hope Gerlach-Houck. As I
“When I first started, I wasn’t comfortable at all doing interviews. I’ve kind of gotten to a point where I just don’t care. If I do an interview, and I have a stutter and then I have to see a lot of things online where people say I say ‘then’ and ‘like’ a lot but
It was more of a feeling I noticed rather than a moment. I was stuttering through situations that had once paralyzed my thoughts in fear without friction. I wasn’t struggling. I didn’t avoid anything. There weren’t any maladaptive side effects to recover from, like what should have been exhaustion from open stuttering more than usual.
With the end of most of the mask mandates, I am confronting an uncomfortable reality—showing my stuttering, again. I hadn’t anticipated the fear and anxiety of doing so after over two years of hiding. The gut-punch landed and left me scurrying to find my bearings. It isn’t that I care what people think of how my
We who stutter need more speech-language pathologists with the courage and blunt honesty like what SpeechIRL demonstrated in their new article, “Just Stop with the Damn Disfluency Counts.” The pseudo-anonymous, united approach of this call-to-arms by SpeechIRL is commendable, and perhaps a foundation for a wider proactive movement—not just a discussion—to confront this aged-out stutter-counting practice. And that is how
Every Waking Moment 