I am somebody who developed a stutter at the age of four and it continued to affect my life for the next eighteen years. My name is Steve Hill and I am now (2006) thirty-two years of age and have been fluent for around the last ten years. In this article I am going to write about the different ways in which people try to hide their stutter. Some of these people who stutter are so good at hiding it, that many of their friends or family may not even be aware that they actually have a stutter at all.
I will give examples from my own experiences and I am sure that many other people who stutter do the same as what I used to do.
The first example is in a restaurant. Fluent people look at a menu and will order what they want to eat, this might sound very obvious but this is not what I used to do. I would not look on the menu for something that I wanted but would look for something that I felt confident I would be able to say. I had a huge dislike and fear to certain words beginning with certain letters, probably the worst words were the ones which started with the letter "b". I would therefore of course avoid foods such as braised steak.
One evening when I was around sixteen years of age, I went out for a meal with a group of friends to an Indian restaurant. I looked at the menu and really wanted some form of curry. I looked at the names of these curries and did not feel that I would be able to say any of them. Chicken balti, chicken madras, lamb pasanda, where were all the easy sounds, I thought to myself. In the end, I ended up ordering scampi and chips.
If people asked me a question to which the answer included one of my difficult words, I would then attempt to think of an alternative word to say. Over the years I became an expert at doing this and could think of one of these alternative words in an instant. I have to say however that I was not happy at having to do this and always hoped that one day I would have the confidence to say exactly what I wanted to.
I have a brother who is called Gavin. When I used to phone his house I always hoped that he would answer the telephone as if his wife answered I knew I would more than likely stutter. This was because I found it very hard to say the name Gavin. I however thought of a temporary solution which was to ask if her husband was in rather than ask for my brother by name. She found this very funny and thought I was just joking about, I knew differently of course.
Even though I became quite good at hiding the stutter it was one big effort each day. I was fed up of eating and drinking things that I did not really want and constantly having to think of these alternative words. These efforts caused me a lot of stress and anxiety, my hair even started to turn grey when I was only twenty-one.
I am now happy to say that I am able to say whatever word I want to, even words like balti!