May is National Better Speech and Hearing Month.

There are some things about having grown up with a terrible, debilitating stutter that I wouldn’t trade away now, for anything.

Yes, I could have done without the reflexive cruelty of other kids, who saw an easy way to wound the tall, athletic kid who seemed to have everything else going his way. I would have liked the girls I wanted to talk to not to laugh at me. I really, really wish the adults — teachers and coaches, some of them, who should have known better and been kinder — would not have mocked me in front of my peers when I struggled to get words out. 

I remember speech therapy as a child. I went twice a week in school, and then twice a week after school. My therapist was Mrs. Coyner, and she came to school and I went to the local office of the March of Dimes for sessions. My mother would wait outside and take me for ice cream afterwards if I was crying.

But you couldn’t cry or feel sorry for yourself in front of Mrs. Coyner. That was not going to happen, she wasn’t going to have it. She was three and a half feet tall, in what passed for an electric wheelchair in 1976, the old joystick electrics. 

She was small, crooked, and wizened. I had no idea what illness she had suffered, but she had never and would never walk a step in her life. But she made me keep talking. She made me call libraries and ask about books, or go to restaurants and order for the table. She said, “You’re going to do this because you have to, you don’t have the choice not to.” She made me see my infirmity as part of me, a natural part, something the world would have to deal with the same way I did, all of us together.

And, eventually, here’s what stuttering did for me: 

1. It marked people for me, separating those that pounced on my weakness from those that either took time or just didn’t care. The latter were my friends, and still are. My vulnerability let me recognize the good in others, and for that I am grateful.

2. It focused me on language. I write well, because writing doesn’t trip over a sound. I can take my time, and you can’t squint at me or roll your eyes. I grew up treating good writing as part of the fabric of human solidarity. Literature doesn’t stammer.

My actual stutter was, and is, in the front of my mouth — the d’s and t’s, the dental sounds, the tongue behind the upper front teeth. Some of us struggle with sounds produced in the back of our throats, the g’s, or the middle-upper palate, like n’s, for example. Sound those out for yourself, feel your tongue move, and you can begin to understand where the blockage happens for others.

On a societal level, there are some bizarre advantages to stuttering, that only stutterers really understand, so let me reveal a secret or two. 

After you get through the part where everyone thinks you’re a dummy, there is another phase of unearned intelligence. Stutterers often report being considered smarter than they are. You think I’m taking my time, choosing the perfect word; I’m not. I’m really buying seconds while I run through synonyms for the thing I want to say that doesn’t start with a d. 

That’s why stutterers often have an expansive vocabulary — we have to know what else we can say to convey the meaning we want. We scan ahead through our planned sentences, and replace troublesome words or sound combinations with phrases easier for our tongues and throats. We are looking ahead for words we can comfortably use. Can’t guarantee you can get “disturb” out? Better go with “annoy,” then, it’s safer. “Awful” is easier than “tragic.”

What you hear as deliberative pauses are, instead, strategies to avoid ridicule. 

I still stutter, all the time, but now I’m an attorney. I make my living talking out loud. I’m not a stuttering survivor, I have no tale of overcoming. I just kept talking, I don’t have the choice not to. I have faith that the ideas behind my words matter more than the production of my speech.

“Spit it out” is the most common taunt of a stutterer’s youth. Well, alright, I’ve spat it out. And these days I’ll debate anyone, anywhere, anytime; there is no forum in the world in which I wouldn’t speak. If you have a stutterer in your life, let them know this: what you end up saying is a thousand times more important than how you spit it out.

Bradley Schrager is an election lawyer at Bravo Schrager LLP, a law firm he co-founded in 2023. Schrager handles election law, ballot measures, campaign finance, state and local government matters, ethics investigations, legislative strategies and more, for a wide variety of clients including state and national political parties; federal, state, and local candidates; legislative caucuses; political action committees and others involved in political and legislative processes. He is a graduate of Washington University (A.B.), Northwestern University (Ph.D.), and the University of Notre Dame Law School (J.D.).