THE STUTTER STEPS OF RECOVERY
SIX WEEKS AFTER SURGERY IN SANTA FE FOR TRAUMATICALLY TRIPPING AND FALLING AND SHATTERING MY RIGHT SHOULDER IN PARIS, I HAVE COME TO REALIZE THAT TRAUMA DOES NOT ITSELF FALL TRIPPINGLY ON THE TONGUE
(Above: Talismans with which I travel. The question I write about below along with a rock from my walk across the Camino and one from my climb to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, two earlier pilgrimages of mine, and a crystal a friend gave me to take on this one I am now on.)
When I was 7 and 8 years old back in 1960s Mississippi, I began to stutter. I was teased and bullied mercilessly about it in second and third grades even more so than the teasing and bullying I experienced for being a sissy. I discovered that if I owned my being a sissy - doubled down on my akimbo doubling of my little hands on my sassy hips and stood my ground where others played at recess - that I could weaponize it because being unapologetically a sissy actually scared people and threw them off balance as I more firmly balanced myself with my feet-apart, hands-on-my-hips stance against what I even then thought was the stupidity of others for not seeing being a sissy as a rather superior rarified state of being. But stuttering? That made me feel like the stupid one. I thought I deserved the ribbing about my inability to pronounce words that stumbled from my mouth. Indeed, I once was giving a reading at an esteemed high school in Virginia from my first memoir about that childhood of mine titled, yes, Mississippi Sissy, and noticed when I was talking about being such a rare thing - a proud little sissy - that a football player wearing his letter jacket began momentarily to cry in the audience and some of his teammates tried to comfort him before he gathered himself. I just assumed that he was a gay kid who needed to face his closet door and open it. But talking to him later I realized what he had responded to instead was my talking about my also being a stutterer because he too stuttered and suffered such shame from it. We bonded that day after my talk, this older gay man and this young football player, based on our shared shame at how stubborn we found consonants could be. Silence is the only closet in which a stutterer can hide and thus not really an option for us - even saying “closet case” gives us away as we summon the valor to attempt the velarization the sounds command.
Balance and stumbling and summoning valor. I have been thinking a lot about all three since I lost my balance on a Metro stairwell in Paris on April 30th and lurched, I presume, stumblingly to the bottom of it since I have no memory of the fall itself or its impact. I only remember screaming after missing the second step and the next thing I can recall is being put into an ambulance on Avenue des Champs-Élysées. I had no idea where I was nor how long I had been there. I only knew I was bloodied and in pain inside an ambulance with my pants leg being cut open to get to my damaged knee that needed suturing. I also knew my shoulder was in immense pain - I have been summoning the valor to deal with the constant pain ever since - but did not know until an hour or two later that it was shattered and in need of surgery. And I knew I was gay - the proud little sissy surfaced almost immediately as I noticed how cute the male emergency workers were - but I didn’t know much more of my story. I did know my name and knew enough to ask for my phone so I could scroll through my social media posts to see where I was and what I had been doing there. As I read those posts, I discovered anew the narrative of my life and gave myself back the rest of my story. In fact, I even began to post about the fall and being bloodied inside the ambulance in real time on social media because after realizing I was in Paris and beginning to remember a bit of the last six months there and in London, I also realized I was - I am - a writer, one who has always dealt with trauma in my life since I was 7 and 8, when my parents died consecutive deaths from a car accident and then from cancer, by stepping outside the trauma to become a character in my own narrative. It is how I survived. It is how I still do so. I am doing it now with this column.
So. Okay. This is a part of my present narrative: I have begun to stutter badly again. It is to me one of the most alarming side effects of the fall and the shoulder injury and the surgery. I assumed the pain would be my cranky companion for a time and that sleep would be difficult (though not as difficult as it has been when the pain ramps up when I lie down at night). At first I attributed the stuttering to my just being exhausted from not having had a full night’s sleep for the last two months. But a couple of days ago, I realized maybe there was a deeper reason for it. I didn’t stutter as a child until my parents died, the ur-trauma of my life. I really haven’t dealt emotionally yet with this latest trauma of another kind of brokenness because I have been too busy playing the character of The Tough Old Coot in the narrative about it all and getting on with my life as a spiritual and cultural pilgrim in the world. I had the surgery in Santa Fe where I flew with my shoulder still broken. I healed a bit there and then for a month in San Francisco. I am now here in New York City dealing with insurance companies giving me the run-around about physical therapy. I have stuck to my travel plans on my pilgrimage. I looked on the brokenness and pain - and now the slow healing needed - as a crucible that was deeply a part of the pilgrimage I am on, unexpected by me but planned by the litany of gods and goddesses who are leading me onward. How I continue to deal with it all as I continue will be part of my spiritual awakening.
And yet dealing with the stuttering is awaking something else in me: shame. And that shame shadows other aspects of this experience. My feeling feeble for the first time. Old. Infirm. Physically challenged. Poor. Scarred. Unattractive. I have always known I had a body that could be whipped into shape and attract others. I don’t feel that is possible anymore. My sense of self was shattered along with my shoulder which was as fractured as my words have now once more become.
And then there is the fear. I have a handwritten question framed that I carry with me to place in the many tiny Airbnb and hostel rooms in which I now live around the world in my monkish pilgrim’s life. I drew the question from a hat once in a meeting pertaining to my recovery from addiction. It asks: How do you handle fear in recovery? The recovery mentioned is about that we live one day at at time as addicts no longer in active addiction. But in some way as I have stared at that question over and over these last eight months as a kind of talismanic signal to me that wherever I place it is home, I have manifested the need to recover physically and the fear now embedded in me is not existential but about falling again and further injuring myself. I have been a bike rider all my life. I have loved riding bikes in cities to get to places I need to be. But I am now unsure if I’ll ever ride a bike again because I am so afraid, even if helmeted, of being in an accident. There is even fear embedded in my voice as I try to form words that refuse to be formed and spoken. Stuttering to me now - as it was when I was child - is the sound of fear itself, staccato, scattershot, unfocused, free-floating, unanchored, the approaching drumbeat of coming undone.
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Poet Kenneth Koch suffered from a severe stutter. He wrote a poem about it, titled “To Stammering.”
Where did you come from, lamentable quality?
Before I had a life you were about to ruin my life.
The mystery of this stays with me.
“Don’t brood about things,” my elders said.
I hadn’t any other experience of enemies from inside.
They were all from outside—big boys
Who cursed me and hit me; motorists; falling trees.
All these you were as bad as, yet inside. When I spoke, you were there.
I could avoid you by singing or acting.
I acted in school plays but was no good at singing.
Immediately after the play you were there again.
You ruined the cast party.
You were not a sign of confidence.
You were not a sign of manliness.
You were stronger than good luck and bad; you survived them both.
You were slowly edged out of my throat by psychoanalysis
You who had been brought in, it seems, like a hired thug
To beat up both sides and distract them
From the main issue: oedipal love. You were horrible!
Tell them, now that you’re back in your thug country,
That you don’t have to be so rough next time you’re called in
But can be milder and have the same effect—unhappiness and pain.
###
My unhappy enemy inside is the painful trauma of having fallen and broken my shoulder, a manifestation of my deeper childhood orphaned trauma and brokenness. My stuttering, then and now, was and is a manifestation as well of how the trauma felt and feels, both echoing and folding in on itself while doing so, like consonants caught rat-a-tat-tatting in the spokes of my spoken voice, the wheel that turns on this bicycle I am not riding but carries me onward nonetheless, trauma yet again the training wheels of my life.
I don’t pedal right now. A “helmet” is but a word hard to pronounce with four consonants and one vowel proudly standing akimbo within it like a little Mississippi sissy still standing his ground inside his trauma. But I begin anew. I stutter forth toward the rest of my story. This is the first next sentence in telling it.
...and don’t bully yourself.
Beautifully written- I’ve been an admirer for a few years now. Your skill with the written word often leaves me awestruck ( and envious!)