Stutter

This month's article has a very specific, target audience. Namely, people who stutter. According to National Stuttering Association of the USA that's about 1% of you. I am an ex-stutterer. One of the consequences of the accident, to me, was that I began speaking correctly and I feel it's only correct that I share with you, how I feel that was achieved. Firstly, a short disclaimer; I am not a medical professional, nor have I studied anything in the area of speech. I simply find myself as part of a rare group (definitely more rare than 1%), of people who used to, but no longer stutter. 

The brain controls everything; the infrastructure that is responsible for human speech involves an extensive subset of those systems. Although I don't know anything about the speaker here, he outlines the basics around my journey from stutterer to regular person (normal), although I didn't know much about that journey while I was on it. 

I'll guesstimate that I was around 10 years old when I had my first experience of stuttering. I was in primary school when the teacher asked me for the Irish for "I was". She had chosen me because she knew that I would know the answer and thus make an example of some other, less studious person. There I was knowing the answer -- bhí mé (pronounced vee may) -- but unable to articulate it. In the end, I gave up, feigned ignorance, and passed up my chance to win (I was a very competitive schoolboy).

Many more humiliating incidences would follow. In hindsight, that was approximately the time in which I had started to take my self-image more seriously. Always being a bit overweight, which was helped by my unseen hypothyroidism, I got into an unfortunate habit. It probably started as a conscious effort, but my brain tattooed this behaviour on my person indefinitely, I began to "suck in my gut", which involved more than pulling in my stomach, away from my t-shirt, but also contorting my innards, including engaging my abdominal muscles. 

One of the consequences of the injuries I received was a loss of the ability to utilise a range of muscles, including some unseen and uncaredabout muscles. This resulted in my abdominal muscles lacking the motivation to contort my midriff, thus permitting my diaphragm to do its job, or one of them, to push my breath out through the vocal chords, unobstructed by vanity. I can't really say why this helped, but it's intuitive to me that messing with that system would have consequences. And, at the end of the day, there is some truth in that annoying advice that normals give when they see you s-s-struggling with a word. Relax[end of traditional advice]; start again, breath from the stomach.

My Tree

Records

*Around the block 500m    31:21

*biking                    10k       24:32

*rowing                    3k          16:23

skierg                      1400m   11:00