Yesterday, someone said to me, “You are so passionate about stuttering and talking about it. What drives you?” That was really interesting, because it came out of the blue, as an observation from a non-stuttering friend. She said it seems like I could talk about stuttering to anyone who will listen.

This after she overheard someone mention that they had heard me speak a couple weeks ago at a stuttering workshop for speech therapists. (Which, by the way, was a very cool thing to do. There were 87 SLPs in the audience and they seemed hungry for real-life information on stuttering. There were 3 of us stutterers presenting, and you could have heard a pin drop. They were hanging on our every word.)

It’s not so bad to be driven about stuttering, is it? I guess I have reached a point where I feel I can and should try to educate people about stuttering. After so many years of being ashamed to talk about it, or even admit I stutter, now it seems that something has been unleashed inside of me. Like the vise that was around my throat is finally off and now that I am talking, nothing will stop me. Like the genie in the bottle when the cap is taken off after a thousand years of being held prisoner. I wouldn’t even want all three wishes granted by the genie, just one: to get the word out.

I always kept my stuttering a secret, and kept it only in my head. Once, I found a couple of old journals of mine and saw I made some fleeting references to stuttering, like “I didn’t stutter much today” and “wonder what they thought when I stuttered”. I kept those thoughts to myself.

Now I blog, post on stutteringchat and covert-S, and even craft speeches for Toastmasters about stuttering. So, is that passion? YES IT IS. I love to help someone understand what stuttering is and is not. I am an expert on my own stuttering and if sharing that with someone (or a lot of someones) can make a difference, then its a good thing to be passionate about.

If the non-stuttering community can better understand what its like to get stuck, even for just a few seconds, and feel like a genie in a bottle, and I can have something to do with that, then that’s what I wish for.