Most people are surprised when I tell them I have a stammer.
That’s because they don’t hear it.
Or rather, they don’t hear the amount of work that goes into making sure they don’t hear it.
The Early Years
I am a stammerer and have been all my speaking life.
At school I was picked on for it and tried to minimise it by speaking more slowly and using smaller, simpler words. This, in turn, made people assume I wasn’t intelligent. Everyone talked down to me and treated me as if I was less capable than I really was.
People didn’t just hear my speech difficulty.
They assumed I had a thinking difficulty.
I quickly learned that if people struggle to understand how you speak, many of them begin making assumptions about how you think.
If eyes are the windows to the soul, then perhaps the mouth is the WiFi enabled smart speaker to the mind?
(Hmm, you’re stretching the analogy a little thin there. – Ed.)
It wasn’t until later, when I was in secondary school, that I got a speech therapist who actually made a difference.
Although, at the time, I was less than pleased with her approach.
She wrote me a letter, sealed it, and told me to deliver it to my headmaster at school the next day.
Now, in the early 1980s, at my school you only went to the headmaster’s office for one thing.
Namely, corporal punishment.
So there I was, standing outside the headmaster’s office, listening to the sound of leather on palms and hearing the wails of the student inside, getting more nervous by the second.
The door opened, a crying boy emerged, and the headmaster , a veritable mountain of a man feared by all , stepped out, took one look at me and exclaimed:
“Little? What are you doing here? Come in, boy.”
Long story short, I nervously handed him the letter and he did something I’d never seen before, nor since.
He laughed.
He promptly marched me down to the “forbidden zone” ( namely the teachers’ common room, which in those days was a haze of cigarette smoke ) addressed my English teacher by her first name and told her, in no uncertain terms, that I was joining her after-school acting club.
I couldn’t argue.
I mean, I wanted to, but you never answered back to the headmaster.
Press-ganged against my will into the acting club?
I swear there must be something in that which violates the Geneva Convention.
Oddly, on stage I noticed something.
I rarely stammered over my lines.
I never stammered when singing.
(I mean, I couldn’t hold a tune if you gave it to me in a bucket, but at least I didn’t stammer tunelessly.)
And I could recite whole Shakespearean monologues like…
Well, I was going to say like an RSC professional, but no…
Like a sixteen-year-old Scottish schoolboy.
The difference?
The speech became:
- structured
- rhythmic
- intentional
I wasn’t speaking spontaneously.
I was performing.
The Post-Education Years
Over the years, through university and into work, I kept the performance up.
I developed:
- a comfortable speech rhythm
- pacing and pauses
- a fallback repertoire of repeated phrases
- verbal scaffolding
- and, eventually, my “stage voice”
Many decades (and one very late autism diagnosis) later I realised something else.
In researching autism and trying to understand its impact on my life , and ways to mitigate it , I discovered the concept of autistic masking.
Once I understood masking, I recognised I’d been doing exactly the same thing with my speech. My repertoire of repeated phrases and stock responses? Echolalia!
Long before I knew the word “masking”, I was already an expert at it.
Today people often look at me with genuine confusion when I tell them I stammer.
Invariably someone replies:
“But… you don’t stammer!”
That means I’m doing what I’m doing well.
But what they don’t see is:
- the intense concentration
- the constant monitoring and adaptation of what I’m saying
- the fatigue from the continual mental effort
- the stress of trying to do all of that and get my point across at the same time
I’ve become remarkably good ( you might even say circus-level good ) at spinning plates on sticks.
What people don’t realise is this:
Fluency is not the absence of effort.
When the Mask Slips
Of course, it doesn’t mean I can get away with this all the time.
Maintaining the performance takes a tremendous amount of mental energy.
Running my ship with shields up all day eventually depletes the dilithium crystals and I need time to recharge.
When I’m tired, my stammer returns.
When I’m overwhelmed, my stammer returns.
When I’m under pressure or stressed, my stammer returns.
This isn’t failure.
It’s simply the consequence of running out of the resources required to maintain a very energy-intensive system.
The Stigma of the Stammer
Despite it being 2026 as I write this, and despite the enormous strides made in neurodiversity awareness and acceptance, I still encounter stigma.
Sometimes it is unintentional and well-meaning.
Sometimes it is neither.
People:
- become impatient and try to rush me
- make assumptions about my intelligence (or perceived lack thereof)
- take pleasure in mocking or joking about my stammer
- simply talk down to me
And the thing that really grinds my gears is when people, under the guise of being helpful, decide to finish my…
(Sandwiches? – Ed.)
No.
My sentences.
Like so many neurodiversity-related challenges, the actual problem isn’t usually the stammer itself.
The problem is often society’s reaction to it.
Summing Up
When I was young, the goal was often to hide differences.
Today we’re increasingly learning to understand them.
I still have a stammer.
The difference is that now I understand it.
I understand the techniques I’ve developed, the effort they require, and the role they’ve played in shaping who I am.
I also understand that communication is about far more than flawless delivery.
A person’s worth isn’t measured by the smoothness of their speech.
And perhaps that’s one of the more encouraging things about the growing neurodiversity movement.
We’re slowly learning that different doesn’t mean broken.
Sometimes it simply means different.
That seems like a conversation worth having.
…. Even if it occasionally takes me a little longer to say it.