Dear Rachel
by Michael Retzinger
(Mike, an SLP in Wisconsin, writes to Rachel Szelfi in response
to her article in the May issue of Reaching Out about a speech
she gave on Martin Luther King Jr. Day about her dream to be
able to tell the world about the respect owed to people who
stutter)
Your speech was excellent. Educating others is
the key and you are doing a wonderful service for all of us
who stutter by sharing your speech dream with your language
arts class. As an adult who stutters, I am grateful to you for
educating others. You are a real trooper.
As a child who stutters,
I also had a dream. My dream was personal, too. My dream affected
me, I did not know it affected anyone else. My dream was about
learning how to live with a speech problem called stuttering.
I did not believe I could live with it. I have been stuttering
since I was four years old. My dream was that I would not be afraid
to stutter, that I would not be afraid to talk.
I dreamed people
would be more understanding of me even if I stuttered. I dreamed
people would listen to me as I was and take me for what I am.
I dreamed that I would be able to be OK how I was. It was a dream
I hoped for. I dreamed this for a long time.
Yet even though I dreamed, I let stuttering make me lonely and
sad when I was a child. I let people finish my sentences for me.
People did not have patience. I was the object of ridicule and
physical beatings from others because I stuttered. I now know
that people then, just as now, really don 't know what it is like
being a child who stutters. People judged me by how I sounded.
Because I stuttered, because I was afraid to talk, I began to
grow silent. How I said things became more important than what
I had to say. I learned early on that it was easy to stop stuttering:
just don't talk. And as I learned this, I became more lonely and
sad. And I wondered about my dream.
As a young adult, I learned
to go after my dreams from a really good speech and language pathologist.
I learned that if you are a person who stutters, you will always
stutter. BUT I could also talk a lot more. I learned (although
this was very difficult to accept) that it is OK to stutter and
that if I wanted, I could overcome my fear of stuttering and my
fear of talking. As I did this, I found out I talked more.
What
I am sharing was the hardest thing to learn: that all I had to
do was say what I wanted to say, even if I stuttered. I learned
to believe in dreams. I learned how to release my talking even
if I stutter. I learned not to be afraid, and in time, my dream
came true. I talk a whole lot more than I stutter today.
I still
dream: I dream that people will learn more about stuttering and
have compassion for people who stutter, especially children who
stutter. I dream that children who stutter will be treated with
dignity and respect. I dream that children who stutter will be
spared the agony of learning to be afraid. I dream that professionals
and parents of children who stutter will care more about what
a child is saying and not about how the child who stutters is
saying it. And I dream that all children who stutter will dream
the dream ... because I know dreams can come true.
Thanks for
sharing your dream, Rachel. I hope you don't mind me sharing mine.
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