Unnaturally Silent: Stuttering, Selective Mutism and Me

Abstract

I have struggled all my life to speak. A catastrophic brain injury when I was a child left me with profound speech impairments, including situational mutism, the most silencing of all. No-one I knew suffered the same affliction, and so I searched out stories of silent protagonists and studied the works of writers like Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath who, in different ways, worked to express the inexpressible. Years of speech therapy helped me acquire the semblance of fluency, although every word is an exhausting act of conscious concealment. Yet I make my living from words. I am a novelist and poet whose work explores illness, isolation and impairment in many different ways, and an oral storyteller who performs on international festival stages. I also teach creative writing and literature, and am a frequent guest on podcasts and radio, most often discussing my doctorate of creative arts which explored the history and purpose of human storytelling through the lens of fairy tales. Many people ask me why I speak so often, when articulating is so difficult. I tell them it is because spoken language is essential to our idea of what it is to be human. Being unable to speak is dehumanising. People who are dysfluent suffer both physically and psychologically, with their difficulties intensified by the societal perception that stuttering is not a disability. Yet not to speak is to be silenced. And, after a lifetime of struggling to recover speech, I refuse to be silenced anymore.