Truth Stutters

A Love Letter to My Younger Self

I 

I grew

I grew grew

I grew…I grew up

I grew…up, up, up

Stutter-stuttering

I grew up with a stutter.

I hated it. It wasn’t a life-threatening condition. It was a soul-emptying one. Simultaneously embarrassing and terrifying. They say when you go blind or lose one sense, your others progressively heighten. I know speech isn’t a sense in the traditional sense of the word, but the same truth applies.

When you can’t speak, your eyes and ears improve. You instantly become a fantastic reader and listener.

I soon started hearing facial expressions. Furrowed brows were lips that mouthed silent words of confusion, frustration, pity (not the good kind either), condescension, anxiety, confusion, and frustration (I know I already used those last adjectives. My repetition wasn’t a typo; it was just a bit of an example. If reading them in print twice is frustrating, imagine how exhausting it is to read them on every brow aimed in your direction).

You begin mixing up the syntax in a way that doesn’t make any real sense; you just hope people won’t notice. Sometimes, when the adjective you want to use starts with a d, you put it after the noun because it’s easier for you to get it out. You rearrange your syntax so much that people begin wondering if English is your first language. The furrowed brows are subtitled again, and you can read between every one of these lines.

Not this again.
Not him again.
Hurry up and move on.
Why are you stuck on these words and these phrases?

Soul-Emptying.

Move On

Everyone knows the feeling of speaking before you’ve thought things through. Wanting to pick up the words that so carelessly fell from your lips. And apologize to everyone for speaking without thinking. Very few people know the agony of wanting to take back not your words but your thoughts. Very few know what it’s like to want to take back these thoughts because you know you’ll never be able to express them. And the longer they sit unexpressed, they create an indigestion of sorts that makes you envious and bitter of the someones who will eventually come along and say your insightful remark or steal your joke (that would never be funny coming from your mouth because the timing of the punch line would always be off).

Very few people know what it’s like for the whole world to beg YOU to

MOVE ON and

TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE!?

Very few know the internal ache that pulsates in your diaphragm when you so desperately want to MOVE ON and TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE….but you can’t. You just can’t seem to finish the sentence and get the words out.

But then, you grow up.

And in some ways, you don’t outgrow the stutter, but you grow out of it. In College you learn that people can’t sing and stutter at the same time, so you start to do spoken word (because you know you can’t sing). The same principles apply. The controlled breathing. The predictable melodic cadence that will follow you for the rest of your life. The inadvertent adoption of East Coast pronunciations of certain consonants and vowels because they were really the only ones with quality video and audio footage back then.

It sounds almost like raps, but you grew up in the suburbs, and despite your athletic frame, no one will believe you had a hard life. Your eyes are too gentle, and you like to show your gap-toothed smile too much. So you call it spoken word and learn to control your breathing. You learn how effective dramatic pauses can be. (People often think you’re inserting a dramatic pause, but you’re not. You’ve learned to know what consonant combinations trip you up, so you hold your breath, catch it long enough to rehearse the sounds in your head, remind your heart to keep beating, and tell your soul it’s okay if you mess up and reveal to the world you still stutter. It all happens in a split second, but you’ve controlled it, and now you release it smoothly).

The brows furrow differently. You read between those lines, and those lips aren’t frowning. They’re smiling.

You learn to talk about a full range of topics. You can talk spirituality, sports, socio-economic development, real estate, entertainment, music, art, biography, hip-hop, etc. You make a living off it. Your speaking literally takes you all over the world.

Finally, you’ve learned how to MOVE ON. You’re pretty good when it comes to TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE. Finally, you can meet the Old World’s request to MOVE ON and TALK ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE. You’re ready.

But then, your brother dies. One of the people who never seemed to care that you stuttered or teased you about it because he knew how much it hurt you. The one person not frustrated or even slightly annoyed by it is gone.

You can’t help but to start talking about his death.

And grief.

And for the first time, you don't want to move on even though you’ve learned how to talk about other things.

Not So Fast

You blink twice, and nine years have passed. You’ve spent the past 2 years sharing your writing publicly in book form. You host two nationwide tours on it. You write a substack. You executive produced a mini-doc and an album. You finished a doctoral dissertation and degree on the topic. You start to get tired of talking about it, sensing the rest of the world would be happy for you to MOVE ON like they did when you stuttered.

But now that you can talk about other things, people are begging you to keep talking about the same stuff.

They don’t want you to MOVE ON.

They’re happy to hear the same words and phrases.

And you stumble into a soul-filling realization.

Maybe stuttering isn’t that bad.

Maybe truth stutters a bit.

No truth sinks in the first time we hear it. We need to hear the same message again.

And again.

And again.

Maybe it’s okay to be known as the “grief guy” for a little bit longer. The people who lose someone tomorrow will be happy you wrote something about it today.

Dear Younger John,

While you’re learning how to speak words of hope to the world, do me a favor.

Love Yourself.

Stutter and all.

It’s gonna come in handy one day.

Peace,

John

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I want to offer a special shout-out to Ken Fentress, Rebekah Giannini, Valerie & Kyle Smith for jumping on as my first 4 paid subscribers. Anyone who knows me knows that my mission statement is to bring beauty into the world by building the best teams on the planet. I randomly turned on the Paid Subscribers last week in hopes of being able to start supporting up-and-coming writers, creators, etc. Thank y’all for being a part of the team I’m building. Can’t wait to see all the beautiful things we’ll make together.

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