Stutterer interrupted, p.2
Stutterer Interrupted, page 2
I finished grad school, got my doctorate in psychology, and became a frustrated dyslexic-stuttering academic. Even though I was able to complete more than eight years of college, I never felt at home in academia. I knew I had important ideas, but my learning disability made it difficult to write them out, especially in a style that felt foreign and inauthentic to who I am.
While I had doubts in my professional life, I was even more lost in my personal life. I was single for the first time in years, having recently ended a long relationship with my boyfriend-at-the-time Sean. A few months later, I met a stuttering guy named Andy. Flirting with another stutterer was so much easier. My previous interactions with men had always been tainted by a constant fear of rejection over my speech. But with Andy, I could just talk. I didn’t have to worry about the way I sounded or the risk of spittle flying from my repetitive lips. Having that burden suddenly lifted made me realize how much it had been weighing me down. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to put a man behind a salad bar sneeze guard if I wanted to vamp it up!
Andy and I started dating. He lived four hours away, which made things, um, complicated. I soon learned that one of his housemates was (drumroll) a stand-up comedian! When Andy went to see his housemate perform at an open mic, I told him he should also sign up as a performer, because, “How hot would it be to see a stuttering comedian?” Andy wasn’t interested. I pressed him again and again, but he had no desire to go on stage.
I was obviously projecting my own ambitions onto Andy, but it took me a while to wake up and realize it. Specifically, it took the writing of bell hooks, the feminist author who doesn’t capitalize her name. Throughout her work, she talks about how women in social movements have historically shied from more prominent roles, working behind the scenes to support the male leadership. Hooks counters this with a call to action, challenging women to step into their power and enact social change. That was what I had to do! Instead of convincing some guy to live my dreams for me, I had to step up and take ownership. I thought more about that book and how it related to comedy. Dick Gregory, Paul Mooney, Lenny Bruce, Wanda Sykes—so many of my favorite comedians have used the stage to address civil rights issues. If I couldn’t spread my message through academia, I would do it by bellowing dick jokes into a microphone! bell hooks, if you are reading this (for reasons I can’t imagine), thank you for inspiring this stuttering white woman to follow her dream.
So now I was determined to do comedy, but I needed a place to start. Having spent most of my life in some type of education environment, the San Francisco Comedy College felt like the safest place to dip my toe. It was an actual college, in the sense that Dr. Pepper is an actual doctor, but it provided a risk-free environment to try out ideas and learn how booked shows and open mics worked. I remember driving to my first mic in San Francisco, blasting the 8 Mile soundtrack in my Dodge Nitro. Dressed in three-inch wedge sandals and a five-dollar maternity shirt from Ross that I made work as a regular shirt, I imagined myself crushing this mic like Eminem’s B-rabbit in an epic rap battle.
After waiting all night for a three-minute spot, it was finally my turn to perform. I opened with some riffing on how I drove to the show blasting Eminem in my maternity shirt, etc. The audience—a handful of tourists tricked into thinking this was a real show—couldn’t have given two tenths of a shit. I shifted gears and told them a story about my friend Vanna, who stutters.
The real story goes like this: a few weeks earlier, I went to a bar with Vanna and some of her friends. There were maybe eight of us in total. Our sleazy bartender used the opportunity to flirt in bulk, taking us all on like a potential group orgy. He went down the row and asked our names, Vanna and I being last. I waited uncomfortably for our turn, knowing that one of us would stutter and inspire a dickish remark, which would have me stewing and replaying the incident for days. When it was Vanna’s turn to introduce herself, she started with “V-v-v.” The bartender made an unspooling “give me the rest” motion with his hand. Like a total badass, Vanna looked at him and said, “I stutter and you’re going to have to wait until I finish.”
I told this story to the open mic audience, but with a few key embellishments. Mimicking the bartender’s “give me more” gesture, I added, “Is that what girls say when you take out your dick?” The audience laughed. My first laugh on stage! It was exhilarating. I had spent my whole life thinking of my stutter as a barrier to comedy, but it wasn’t a barrier at all. It was the catalyst I needed to launch my performing career!
Looking back at it now, all my future happiness hinged on that one decision to get up on stage. I have met some of my best friends in the trenches of San Francisco comedy, an assorted gaggle of misfits baring their souls to strangers in dive bars and laundromats. Comedy put me on the path to embracing all aspects of myself, allowing me to express my ideas on my own terms and become a professional speaker. Funny how people are more impressed with “stuttering dyslexic comedian” than they are with “kinda funny unpublished academic with a doctorate,” even though I’m still the same person. It’s just a shift of perspective.
Shifting your perspective: that is key.
2
Four Generations Disabled
Many people who stutter choose not to identify as disabled. Some feel that we don’t share enough in common with people who have more apparent disabilities. Others may not want to be associated with disability because of the stigma that it carries in our culture. Personally, I view disability as a neutral characteristic. There are as many kinds of people with disabilities as there are without. An individual is an individual regardless of ability. That being said, disability can also be a source of group identity. It can be a culture and a community. For me, it has been all those things and more. It has literally been my family.
I am not the first person in my family with disabilities. I am not the second, or even the third. My father was born with hearing loss, as was his father and his father’s mother. We are four generations Disabled. My great grandmother Cecilia came to the United States in the late 1916, from the Tuscany region of Italy. That’s over a hundred years of blaring radios, open doors, and speaking at volumes considered loud even by Italian standards. As long as my father’s bloodline has been in America, we have been Disabled.
When my father was in elementary school, the teacher sat him in the back of the classroom with a box that supposedly amplified his hearing. Although well-intentioned, this was probably the worst idea ever. Students who are Deaf or hard-of-hearing need to sit at the front of the class, because (newsflash!) it’s harder to hear someone from far away. As if that weren’t enough to disrupt his education, he was also constantly pulled out of class for speech therapy. He was even experimented on by doctors, who gave him radiation therapy to see if it would shrink his adenoids and cure his hearing loss.1 It didn’t work.
As a child, my dad would often sit on the curb by his house, wondering why he was born with a disability. At church, he would wait until no one was looking and drop some holy water in his ear, hoping God would miraculously grant him normal hearing. It didn’t work. As he got older and learned to live with his disability, he turned his hope to the next generation, praying that none of his children would be born with hearing loss. His prayers were answered, and he got a stuttering-dyslexic daughter instead!
When I was two years old, my mom noticed something “different” about me. At an age when most children are forming words and learning to talk, I was not. I did, however, have my own language of squealing noises to indicate which foods I wanted to eat. For cheese, I made a chirping sound. Chicken, incidentally, was more of a cluck. My mom would pretend to understand what all the other noises meant, nodding her head and smiling. When I caught on that she didn’t actually understand me, I got frustrated and stopped vocalizing altogether. That really worried my parents. With our family’s history, they knew these were early signs of hearing loss. In fact, I did not have hearing loss. Instead I had a central auditory processing disability (CAPD). If the words you hear sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher (“wa-wa-wa-wa”), as it does in CAPD, the words out of your mouth are also going to be “wa-wa-wa-wa-wa.”
My parents took me to the doctor to test my hearing. When the tests came back in normal range, they enrolled me in speech therapy at the Oakland Children’s Hospital. There I was seen by a woman named Elaine for speech articulation issues.
Elaine Wells was the first, last, and best speech therapist I ever had. I don’t remember loving therapy, but I do remember loving Elaine. She had a Dorothy Hamill hairstyle and pictures of her children all over her office. She worked with me on my Rs, Ss, and Ts. She taught me how to keep my tongue in my mouth. She made me practice talking with Cheerios in my mouth (I recall being disappointed that they weren’t Lucky Charms). All the sessions were free, paid with a grant scholarship to the hospital. Eventually, I had to be transferred to another speech therapist in Alameda. He smelled like cigarettes and had yellow teeth. I wouldn’t get to see Elaine again until I was in middle school.
By the time my articulation issues improved, I began to stutter and have difficulty reading. This was in third grade, when impaired reading starts to affect all areas of education. I was no longer learning to read, but reading to learn, which meant I couldn’t keep up with the lessons in class. My teacher spoke with my parents about the possibility of dyslexia.
For the rest of that year—and many years after—my parents had to fight for my education. Teachers and administrators resisted them at every turn, saying I wasn’t good enough for their school, that I was robbing an enrollment slot from smarter, more deserving children. They straight up told my mom and dad that I wouldn’t be capable of more than flipping burgers as an adult.
My parents weren’t about to let some narrow-minded Catholic school dictate my future. My mom contacted U.C. Berkeley to find out what happens when students with learning disabilities go to college. The university wrote her back with a description of all the services and accommodations they provide—services and accommodations I was definitely NOT getting at my school. My mom presented the letter to my principal and teachers, to prove that a student can meet academic standards while still receiving accommodations for their disability. My teachers were unimpressed. They doubted I would ever finish high school, much less get into a university like Berkeley. Nonetheless, the letter was saved in a drawer at home with other important documents, like my social security card and savings bonds from my First Communion.
As much as Catholic school sucked, I was lucky to have a family like mine. My parents were way ahead of the curve when it came to caring for a child with disabilities. My dad had his experience with hearing loss, and my mom had seen her mother live with the effects of post-polio syndrome. I wasn’t the “special” one; disability was the family status quo. It was just another thing you dealt with, like flossing or doing taxes. It didn’t define you or limit your choices in life. You could work, marry, have kids. My parents knew this from seeing their own parents live normal lives, and they had similar expectations of me. If my teachers said I couldn’t achieve the same things as other students, my parents let me know those teachers were full of shit. In a house where Richard Pryor specials were considered family entertainment, they may have actually used those exact words.
When my dad was growing up, his father drove him long distances to get the best possible help for his hearing loss. Going the extra mile (or many miles) for children with disabilities is a tradition in our family. Between his day job and night job, my dad would drive me forty miles to see Elaine. By the time we got there, he was so exhausted that he usually slept in the waiting room. Once, after waking him up, Elaine said, “You know, Jerry, there are other speech therapists closer to you.” He replied, “Yeah, but Nina likes you.” The tradition has continued to the next generation. When my niece was diagnosed with a learning disability, you can bet we were all there at the school meetings, making sure she got the best accommodation plan possible.
Caring for children with disabilities goes beyond making sure they get the right accommodations and treatment. I still stutter and have dyslexia, and all the therapy in the world isn’t going to change that. But my parents showed me how to accept these things, even if that acceptance is a lifelong process. When I was in sixth grade, my dad coached the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) girls’ softball team. At the beginning of our first practice, he announced, “I’m deaf and you’re just going to have to speak up when you’re talking to me.”
I was horrified to see him present his disability out in the open. I waited for the other girls to laugh. They didn’t laugh. In fact, they didn’t care at all. My father wasn’t ashamed of his disability, nor was he ashamed of mine. We were just there to throw a ball in the grass and have a good time. Now, when I do stand-up, public speaking, and even job interviews, I like to tell my audience, “I stutter and you’re just going to have to wait patiently for all my brilliant ideas.” I guess the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
Of course, not all parents of children with disabilities have disabilities themselves, but they can still serve as role models. There are going to be peers, teachers, and random passersby who make children feel bad about themselves. Our job is to protect them, to make them feel both special and normal at the same time. If that sounds tricky, it is. Being a good role model doesn’t mean being perfect; my dad once lost his temper and threw an eraser across the room because my brother was being difficult with his drafting homework (we still laugh about it today). What’s important is being authentic and promoting the values we want our children to believe in. It is ultimately up to the person with disabilities to decide who they are and how they want to be treated. Which is also tricky. Look how hard it’s been for me!
3
I, Nina
When I was in sixth grade, I decided to run for student government. To be more precise, I ran for “religious affairs officer” (Catholic school government has no separation of church and state, naturally). Duties of the religious affairs officer included collecting mission money and saying the morning prayer at assembly. I just wanted an excuse to get out of class. For me and my dyslexia, any time not in the classroom was a good time. I wasn’t worried about the morning prayer, since it’s easier not to stutter when reciting a passage or speaking in unison with a group. What was not to love about this job?
I constructed my campaign speech to exclude any words that might trip me up. I practiced my speech over and over, until it became another rote passage I could recite like the morning prayer. The only downside to reciting my speech on autopilot1 was that it took away any emotion or authenticity. Then again, I wasn’t exactly emotional about selling candy bars for Jesus. If I could just get through this one speech, it would be smooth sailing from here on out. Or so I thought.
I won the election, despite my opponent claiming that I bribed the grammar school kids by handing out Tootsie Roll Pops with my name on them. You call it bribery; I call it cross-promotion. Dirty Catholic school politics always triumph!
The new student council was to be sworn in at the beginning of the next school year. In true Catholic fashion, the school did this with an overly elaborate ceremony. When I found out I would have to give an inauguration speech, I felt my stomach twist. After agonizing over that last speech, I was back to square one! Worse than square one, because this time we had to rehearse the ceremony as a group. No more practicing alone in my room until I had worked out all the “stutter bugs;” this time my peers were going to see how the sausage gets made.
My teacher, Mrs. Castillo, led us through the rehearsal. Even though it was the 80s, Mrs. Castillo dressed about two or three decades behind. She looked like the female villain from a Frankie and Annette beach party movie. Between her cat-eyed glasses, polyester suit, and beehive hairdo, Mrs. Castillo looked like she was living in an alternate timeline where rock music is illegal and married partners sleep in matching twin beds. I remember once staring at her during a windy lunchtime recess. Garbage and leaves were blowing everywhere, but the wind couldn’t penetrate her dyed-black bouffant. Not a single hair out of place!
As we rehearsed the ceremony, I learned that each student had to state, “I, [insert name here]” before reading the inaugural oath. Saying one’s name is often a stumbling block for people who stutter. For me, the combination of saying “I” followed by “Nina” is a guaranteed stutterpalooza. We can contrive sentences to avoid problem words all day long, but there’s no substitute for your name unless you straight up change it, which some of us might do from time to time. But this wasn’t a Starbucks order where I can be sly and say my name is Enid. I had to say “I, Nina G…”
I stuttered in the rehearsal, drawing laughs from the seventh and eighth graders who had been elected for their “leadership qualities.” What really pisses me off is that one of the girls laughing had a mild stutter herself. Thanks a lot, Elizabeth! I guess there’s no such thing as stuttering solidarity in the dog-eat-dog world of middle school. Mrs. Castillo attempted to intervene by telling the students to “shut up,” but it didn’t work. I left feeling defeated. I also left with the realization that Mrs. Castillo was actually kind of cool.
At least one of my peers didn’t laugh. He was an eighth grader, a little on the hyperactive side (I’ve always gotten along with hyperactive males, which is a plus when you work in comedy). I don’t remember his name. I used to call him Elvis, because one year he dressed like a 1970s Elvis in a white jumpsuit for Halloween—just the type of confident weirdness I like!
