Bloody. Bleeding. Blink. Bloody. Breath. Blood. Bleeding.
Christ, that’s a lot of /b/ sounds. Why did I ever write so many /b/s into a paragraph at once.
Take it slow, a voice tells me, and I can’t be sure if it's mine or hers.
B-b-….buh…buhluh—
Slower.
Deep breath, Camponovo. Breathe. Shit, that’s another one. Inhale. Exhale. Okay.
Bloody.
Attaboy, a voice says, as if I were a dog sitting for a bone, and once more I can’t be sure if it was me or my speech pathologist, who's seated across the table.
Alright, only six more, the voice says, and this time I know it’s not me.
A week ago was my faculty/senior reading. Writing majors are encouraged to sign up to read 10 minutes of their work in the winter of their senior year on campus, and a junior-year-version of me must have figured “why the hell not?” and signed up for a time slot.
I’ve had a manageable stutter for most of my adult life that is exacerbated by moments of heightened stress and anxiety, and for me, public speaking is public enemy number one. I’d done a pretty good job avoiding it lately; very few college classes require solo presentations the way high school classes always seemed to. Over the past three years I had practiced blending in and making people think I was normal like them. My reading was, with little exaggeration, some of the first public speaking I had done in the past three or four years, but I’d been worrying about it for nearly as long.
My first session of speech therapy for the new year was Monday, Jan. 9. I printed out and brought in the pages I had planned on reading and told my speech pathologist that I wanted to spend the next month, essentially in its entirety, working on them. Four weekly meetings, 50 minutes each, practicing strategies and rehearsing a dry run of an 8-10 minute reading at the end of the month. Coupled with my own practice readings outside of our sessions, I had invested probably 50 times the length of the reading itself in rehearsing for it. And honestly, sitting in University 201 on Tuesday, waiting for my name to be called, it felt like it wasn’t nearly enough.
I remember going into autopilot during the reading. I had read these pages out loud so many times the previous month, they didn’t even feel like true words coming out of my mouth anymore. I had reduced them all to their component parts, looking for the sounds that would give me trouble, the sounds I could blend into their neighbors. Rush the /b/ together with the /l/, /uh/ /d/ /y/ “bloody” and on into the next one, just like we had practiced. Don’t stop to breathe, breathing slows you down, loses your rhythm, and besides, you can’t even pronounce the word “breathe,” moron, but you'd better, since it’s coming up in three lines, just like we practiced, and a-one, and a-two. The words didn’t even feel mine anymore. They were foreign. I could have been reading "Cathedral" out loud, for all I knew; it sure as hell didn’t feel like the novella I had poured myself into during the latter half of the fiction sequence junior year.
I realize the inherent, post-modern absurdity of writing a piece about practicing reading a piece I wrote last year. I realize, too, the added layer of absurdity that constitutes you reading it right now.
I want to tell you it went off without a hitch, that I was able to say each and every “bloody” and “bleeding” and “blink” and that they became mine again, but I already told you it didn’t. The first “bloody” was alright, but the second one crept up on me (even though it was highlighted and underlined in my manuscript) and tripped me up for a second. I can’t even be too sure anybody noticed, except for my friends who know me well enough to have noticed, flashing a quick smile or a small nod to indicate that, yes, that just happened, yes, you know I saw it, I was there, now regroup, before anyone else sees it too, and it’ll stay our dirty little secret.
Worst of all, I was a coward and substituted “baseball” for “little league” in the first sentence because “little” has, pound for pound, been my absolute all-time worst word. I’ve all but erased it from my spoken vernacular.
So far I’ve only told one person the truth about the word I changed (not counting however many will read this column). And, when I meet with my speech therapist again on Monday, I’m not sure I’ll tell her the truth, either. She’ll ask me how it went, and I’ll smile a bit and say it went fine, better than expected. She’ll tell me that’s great. She’ll ask if there were any problems, and I’ll say yes, the “blood” parts we were worried about. I won’t mention the “l,” and she won’t ask, and we’ll move on in the session, double-time, to make up for the lost last month, and I’ll go through the exercises and motions with my awful knowledge.
The old school of speech therapy tackled the stutter with a supremely optimistic viewpoint, a “we’re going to ‘fix’ you back to normal” mentality that the experts abandoned for a more robust “we’re going to hide it, and teach you some techniques and tricks to mask it and make people think you’re normal” mindset. That school, too, is obsolete — the field nowadays preaches a new school of accepting oneself, like a self-help seminar in a board room at a cheap hotel. It advocates for us to embrace that which makes us stutterers different and unique; and besides, who’d want to be normal like them anyway?
I’m learning. I’m getting there, I’m learning I don’t have to be ashamed anymore. And yet, back against the wall, moment of truth, I changed the word. And nobody even noticed. “Baseball,” they were probably thinking, yeah, that makes sense. I panicked in the face of danger, chickened out, changed the word, and, like in the old school, I found myself ashamed again. I’m working with the hippie self-accepting feel-good new school, trying my damndest, but in the heat of the moment, I was fallible, and I was a liar, and what’s arguably worst of all, it worked. Nobody even knew. I had finally tricked them, lied to them and to myself, like I had been trying to do for the past 21 years of my life, made them think I could walk and talk just like them. And in that ugly sense, I became normal.
I feel like a 19th century schoolchild who has sinned, secretly switched the word, and needs to be scared with images of fire and brimstone into confessing. I deserve punishment. I am a coward, and I am a failure. If this is how the more-than-other-half lives, I can say for one of the first times in my life that I don’t want it anymore. Maybe the hippie self-accepting feel-good new school was onto something. Who would ever want to be normal like them?
Breathe, Camponovo. Breathe.
Rush the /b/ together with the /r/, /ee/ and voice the /th/.
