Stuttering is one of the biggest fears and problems people face in this world. I had it when I was growing up and I was absolutely terrified of it. I remember avoiding everything that had to do with talking in front of a crowd. I would do this every day that I could. Just the thought of speaking in front of a crowd and not being able to finish a sentence would paralyze me.
At the time, there wasn’t that much information on the subject, and on pretty much anything really. Today, we live in an age where almost everything can and is diagnosed. Almost everything has some sort of treatment and can help the patient have a better quality of life. As far as stuttering, there are many techniques that can be used to help the person who has it to better adapt to our demanding world.
I didn’t have that at the time, so as you can imagine, I had a lot of trouble with bullying. Bullying was seen as a normal part of growing up by many people. Some teachers would step up from time to time, but only when it got physical. If it was anything like verbal abuse, most adults would not even notice it unless the child told them. Of course, bullying only made the stuttering worst.
For people who haven’t suffered from this, it might seem like something difficult to understand but stuttering affects the person in many ways. The most obvious one is with your self-confidence. The more you stutter, the less you trust in yourself. You shy away from opportunities to try something new because you start to perceive yourself as not good enough.
All you want to do is disappear in that moment. The fewer people know about it the better. I remember I shied away from chances to make new friends because I thought that the minute they introduced themselves, I would start stuttering and then they would have the first impression of ‘the guy who stutters’ which was not fun at all. Fortunately for me, this problem went away as soon as I started high school.
Some people are not that lucky and continue to have that problem well into their adult years. As it is the case with the father in the following video. In the clip, a father sits down to read a bedtime story to his daughter. The only thing is that he stutters. Watch the heart-melting reaction of his daughter, when despite this circumstance, her father stays there reading the entire story!
