Sometimes I feel like I have a great big dust-ball in my mouth. You know what I mean, right? That scratchy feeling you sometimes get when you try to swallow and your mouth and throat is completely dry. You try to swallow and it hurts. There’s no saliva. You try to speak and either just a little croak or absolutely nothing comes out.

This doesn’t happen to me only when I am stuttering. I can be having a great speech day and still get dust-ball mouth. When I talk a lot (which I can do) and forget to sip water, or worse yet, forget to bring it, the dust-ball settles right in the back of my mouth.

When stuttering with a dust-ball in your mouth, every delay and trip is magnified and worsened. It becomes obvious that not only have I run out of air to speak, but I also can’t even swallow. And I really struggle with actually trying not to swallow, because I don’t want to swallow the dust-ball. I can visualize the after-effects of swallowed dust-balls, and its not pretty. Choking up is one thing, literally choking on a dust-ball is something completely different.

If you are not sure how this feels, experiment with it. Take a cotton ball, put it in the back of your mouth and do some voluntary stuttering. “Duh-duh-duh-Dustball”. Its hard to do, without getting the cotton caught farther back in your throat and feeling that you are choking.

What possessed me to write about this? I have no idea, except that sometimes it really feels as if I have dust-balls in my mouth. You?