I was walking to my home in Toronto when a well-dressed man politely stopped me to ask for directions.
“Could you tell me which way to Bloor and…” He struggled to get the next word out, a pained look on his face, but I knew better than to finish his sentence for him.
“… Bathurst?” he said after several seconds of straining. When I started to answer, he told me that he didn’t actually need to know. He was practising stammering openly, he explained, hoping to become more confident doing so around strangers.
I lit up with excitement. “Are you doing that because it’s National Stammering Awareness Day?” I asked, always eager to connect with other people who stammer. When the man asked how I knew that, I said that I grew up with a stammer.
He nodded, looking a bit wistful: “And I suppose your stammer has magically disappeared since then?”
His question gave me pause. I understood why he assumed this—when compared to his fairly severe stammer, I sounded fluent, stammer-free. But even as we spoke, my stammer had influenced my speech: for example, I’d misnamed International Stammering Awareness Day as National Stammering Awareness Day to avoid the tricky front vowel sound at the beginning of the word—a sound I continue to struggle with.
And while it’s true
