Demming

At the age of four I developed a stutter. Even to this day, I am now aged thirty-three, I have no idea as to why I started to stutter. There is not one member of my family who has the speech impediment and for many years I would ask myself the same question, why me? At the age of around fourteen I stopped asking myself questions about how or why I had the stuttering problem and started to look for a solution. I so wanted to be able to talk fluently and I was now asking a new question, is there a known cure for stuttering?

For many years I felt very lonely. I seemed to be in a different world to everybody else, a world of fear and frustration. I worried every day about my speech and about the way in which other people would react, if and when I did trip up on a word. I was constantly frustrated, part of this frustration was due to the fact that I found it so difficult to talk where as other people seemingly found it so easy. The other side to the frustration was the fact that the stutter dictated every decision I ever made and I always ended up accepting second best.

I was also lonely because I felt like I was one of only a few people who had this form of speech impediment, I certainly did not know of anyone else who had the problem. I am now aware that many people suffer with stuttering.

When searching for the stuttering cure, many, in fact most people informed me that you can not cure a stutter. This was of course quite annoying to hear, but was something I did not accept. Aged sixteen I became drunk for the first time, it was also the first time in my life where I had been fluent for a sustained period of time. How strange, I could speak fluently when under the influence of alcohol, who can possibly tell me there is not a cure for stuttering?

Aged twenty-two and after a lot of hard work I managed to rid myself of the stutter, to enable myself to speak fluently when sober and when drunk. My advice to people out there is to not always believe what you are told, where there is a will, there is a way.