Happy New Year

Here's my New Year's resolution when it comes to my speech:

PAUSE.

Yes, that's it.

There are so many pressures in our lives to do things faster and faster. At work and at home, we have to do more with fewer resources, to squeeze the last ounce of energy out of our minds and bodies.

For those of us who stutter, this frantic pace not only exhausts us, it often robs us of a sense of self-worth. We ask ourselves if we have a right to speak when it takes us longer than average to say what we need to say. We try to hurry up, and as a result we stutter more, and then we try to hurry even faster, which makes the stuttering even more severe.

When I find myself caught in this vicious cycle, my goal this year is to stop. Even if it's just for two or three seconds, I will try to just pause.

Pauses are not hard to come by for people who stutter. We often open our mouths and nothing comes out. The whole world shrinks down to an awful, frozen silence. Time stops and we're paralyzed inside it, unable even to breathe.

Matt, our group co-leader, has a perfect image to capture what this feels like: as you're sitting right now, reading this, grip the edges of your chair and try to lift yourself up. Notice how tense you get, how you're holding your breath. Notice how the harder you try to pull up the chair, the worse it gets. Another vicious cycle.

What I mean by pausing, by breaking the cycle, is this: stop gripping the chair, stop trying to lift yourself up. Just sit. Take a breath. Be where you are.

This will not turn you into a person who no longer stutters. Sometimes, after this pause, this letting go, you won't stutter. But sometimes you will. Why do it, then? Because we all need--and deserve--a moment of peace and quiet, of appreciation and acceptance of exactly who we are, exactly where we are.