The depression and lack of confidence.

A few weeks ago, I took a break from work with a co-worker. He's actually somewhat of my supervisor which makes it quite funny that we take "420" breaks quite often. He's usually under a great deal of stress at work and more than often happily exclaims "It's 4:20pm!! Time for our break!". On our way back from one particular outing, the conversation got stale, meaning that there was lengthy pause... one of those awkward silences. He even commented, "Wow... sure got quiet in here all of a sudden!" Because of my nature, whenever those awkward silences happen, I feel guilty. The familiar thought begins to run through my mind that because I'm bad at making small talk, this awkwardness is MY fault. That because I'm a quiet person due to my stutter, I'm making the other person feel awkward, which in turn, makes me even MORE self-conscious about being quiet. It's a feeling that I really don't like. How I wish I could always have something to say.

On a completely unrelated note, I’d like to touch on a comment someone recently left about my last posting. It’s a comment that got me thinking a great deal. I feel that this person called me out on something and what she said really struck a nerve. She brought it to my attention that it seems I harbor a great amount of grief on purpose. She said that I purposely hold on to pain, guilt, and any other type of emotional distress. Perhaps so that I can eventually have it validated, at least that’s what I took away from her comment. If so, then I think she was absolutely right. In a way, this goes back to the feelings I have of thinking I’m misunderstood…which I admit is bullshit sometimes. I foolishly hold on to these feelings with the hope that someone will eventually understand me better once I am able to release all these feelings I harbor. Maybe my inability to let things go is tied to my lows self-esteem… almost as if I don’t deserve to feel good, that I have to keep reminding myself of bad things that I’ve done or just things about me that are reasons for me not letting myself feel good. I think I’m fully aware of how dangerous it is to not let certain pain go… I know it’s truly holding me back. Even when I do feel some sort of pleasure, it’s as if I don’t allow myself to hold on to it. I almost think of it as an accident, a fluke. I begin to think what’s the point of holding on to that pleasurable moment and the positive feelings I get from it if I know I’ll just eventually feel bad again?

About a month and a half ago, I started feeling nausea in the mornings. I just didn’t want to face the day and the thoughts of doing so really wanted to make me vomit. It still happens sometimes. At first, this nausea was real. My thoughts would be so focused on negative possibilities that the day could bring or just thoughts and things about myself that I am ashamed of, that all of a sudden, I would want to vomit. I would hover over the sink gagging, but nothing would come up. I began to feel better after experiencing the gagging sensations, much like when you’ve had way too much to drink and throwing up really makes you feel better. Because of this, there were times when I would forcefully think of as many negative thoughts as I could so that I could go through the motions of feeling this nausea and the eventual gagging just to feel better afterwards. I think this is a good example of how I DO choose to “torture” myself. Why is it so hard for me to just focus on positive thoughts?

I’ve recently been reading through some of my old journals. In one of them, I wrote down how I WANTED to make myself feel as low as I could go… and knowing that I had hit “rock bottom” that it would be easier for me to pick up the pieces. I think I still hold onto that bullshit idea, that if I can just reach this super low, that it would be easier to for me to pick myself up because I’d know I had hit rock bottom.

I’ll admit that I have a problem with thinking about the past too much… to much in the sense that if I think about good times that I may have had, I immediately think that I’ll never feel that good ever again. I really believe that sometimes. And it’s even worse right now because I’m in a depression… nothing seems worthwhile, my life doesn’t seem redeemable in the slightest. One of the things that’s really been on my mind lately is why I feel the way I do right now. What possesses a person to think so pessimistically? It’s a waste of energy, of time, of LIFE. But I can’t stop thinking this way. Please help me understand.

Support group woes

Among the things I've been doing lately in an attempt to combat my feelings on my stutter and depression, is joining a support group for people who stutter. I’ve only attended 2 meetings so far since they’re held once a month. It hasn’t really been as fulfilling as I’ve wanted it to be. Mostly, I feel guilty… guilty that I feel I belong there. My stutter isn’t severe at all, at least not as bad as some of the people in the group. I can almost talk with 90% fluency when I’m there… unless I start to get emotional about something I’m sharing. So because I speak more fluently than others in the group, I feel like I’m full of shit sometimes, and that some of the members look at me and think I’m an ass for wasting their time by being there since I can go for long periods of time without stuttering at all. Maybe its because I’ve mastered the practice of choosing my words carefully and avoiding words that I know make me stutter. This actually isn’t the first support group for people who stutter that I’ve attended. About 6 years ago, I attended another group that was actually more involving in the sense that we shared more personal feelings and didn’t talk about the nature of stuttering itself as we do in my present group. We all shared stories about times in our lives where stuttering posed a difficulty for us. This group was quite rewarding to say the least. So why did I stop going you ask? Well, because of something that happened to one of the members in the group. One of the members committed suicide. We were all told that there were other extenuating circumstances for him taking his own life… personally I didn’t want to believe it, at least not entirely. Because of my personal beliefs, I felt that his suicide had a great deal to do with his stutter and how he let it affect his life, much like myself. The group really didn’t want to explore that and I resented them all for it. I felt that to ignore this possibility was disrespectful to him and that we should have discussed it further, but they avoided it, so I left soon afterwards. Looking back, I see how I may have been angry… angry not at the fact that these people didn’t admit to themselves that our stutter can bother us so much that one of us may look towards the worst solution possible, but angry because I let it fill me with those resentful feelings so much. With the exception of this one person, they were all choosing to live with their handicap while I kept denying it and using it as a crutch.

I don’t know why I wanted to share that story, perhaps it’s because this is a blog and I need to keep sharing all my thoughts about my stutter… so I will.

The person I am, the person I wish to be, and the person I believe I’m perceived as being.

There are maybe two charismatic people in my circle of friends. Whenever we all get together, it’s these two people that make any event joyful by simply being who they are. They have such a carefree way about themselves that it is virtually impossible for anyone to meet them and not like them. I honestly sit in awe when I watch them talk or tell stories. Yet at the same time it reminds me of who I am, and in a way, it makes me just a little sad. I really would almost give anything to be like them, to enter a room and breathe new life into it… to be able to start talking and have people pay attention because of my entertaining nature. I believe that if I didn’t have my stutter, the person that I would have eventually become would have been similar to these two friends of mine.

As a child, I was always happy. If you look at any picture of me before I was 12, you would see a smiling young boy with a glow surrounding him and a love for life. But because of my stutter, which made me shut myself off from the world, I turned out quite different. I can remember a time when I was about 14 years old, I had gone out shopping with my mother and she commented on this change she saw in me. At the end of telling me what she thought, she began to cry. She cried because she was afraid of the new person I had become… a distant and quiet young boy. This is one of the first few moments in my life where I could have realized that the path I was taking was the wrong one. In actuality, I had already accepted the fact that this was who I was supposed to be and to have my own mother reject that, simply fueled my desire to become this misunderstood, tortured soul. “No one will ever understand me”, I thought.

I’m at a point in my life where I no longer wish to play that role, the silent and quiet person who is misunderstood. But it’s hard to change who you are, or in my case, who I forced myself to be. There may have been a time in my life where I was fine with it, when I went along with it… but not anymore. I know I’m perceived as a quiet person who probably accepts his quiet and unassuming nature. But I do not. When I say I have my bad days because of my stutter, more than half of those days do not include any bad case of me stuttering at all. What makes those days unbearable, is the fact that I feel worthless… that I do not matter whatsoever… simply because I do not say anything to anyone practically the whole day. If there is one thing I wish people would know about me, it’s that I’m not comfortable being the quiet person I know they see me as being. I’m sure that if you remember all the way back to elementary school or high school, you can remember those few persons who were just like that… reserved, shy. It’s not that there was anything wrong with them, they were just naturally that way. I do not like being thought of that way. There truly is a voice inside me that is screaming. I know it’s in there struggling to get out. In a way, you could say it’s my soul struggling to show it’s true nature. But because I closed myself off long ago, I feel that the other type of harm I’ve done to myself is a type of social harm. I never let myself learn proper social skills, and I think that there is a crucial time in your life where you develop those skills and it can’t be repeated.

But if there was one thing I wish I could scream aloud from rooftops, it’s that I wish people would know that I am not comfortable with the person I am… not anymore. I look forward to the day when I can engage someone in a fluent conversation and not just let out a whimpering, “Hello, have a nice day” or clumsy small talk.

The repeated silence and it's damage.

Hello there, welcome back. Thanks again for reading this, I’m truly appreciative.

My stutter itself is of course an embarrassing occurrence when it happens. While I’ve always witness people’s confused and bewildered looks whenever I trip on a word, I’ve never gotten used to it. It always makes me feel like less of a person. But there is another side effect of my stutter that at times can hurt me the most out of all the things directly related to my stutter. I touched on it briefly in my first blog entry. It has to do with the choice I made long ago to become this “strong and silent” type.

I was perhaps in my early or pre-teens, definitely at that difficult age for adolescents. Besides the fact that it hurt me when people made fun of me, I also got it stuck into my head that people didn’t want to be near me because of my stutter, that it somehow made them feel uncomfortable. Perhaps I let all those growing concerns bother me too much about my stutter, but at the same time I began to notice changes in my friends’ behavior towards me. I would find out that our small circle of friends would continuously go out without inviting me, or they’d simply just stop calling me. Whenever I did take the initiative to call anyone to go out, I’d be met with excuses as to why they couldn’t. Eventually, when I did end up joining everyone, I would notice that they’d talk about my stutter more freely when I was around, so freely and choreographed that it seemed they already had talked about me when I wasn’t around. Topics would come up regarding how often I stutter or how difficult it would be for me to ask a girl out. While they weren’t ever said in a blatantly negative or condescending way, all these things would build up for me and I eventually became bitter. Looking back, I don’t think anyone ever meant to hurt me, but because I am an overly sensitive person, these occurrences brought out a severe change in me that continued for the next few years and eventually merged itself into my psyche.

I began to think that I wasn’t meant to be a social person, that I was meant to be one of those quiet types that people thought of as being strong and proud. You could say I adopted the attitude of the loner who wasn’t lonely, but just walked around with a great sense of pride because I didn’t have to rely on anyone to make myself feel better. But that decision carried a bitterness that I didn’t realize, a bitterness that would do more damage to me than be the safety net I thought of it as being.

The thought process behind that attitude I had adopted was that I became this person who walked alone and was proud of it. But over the past few years, I’ve slowly realized that this decision I made, this “persona” I adopted, was a defense mechanism… actually no, it was more of a way of giving up, plain and simple. Instead of becoming the silent person with the big heart that I thought of myself as being, I slowly became a bitter lonely person who refused to share his emotions or allow himself to care about anyone else. I hate to say it, but this continued for years, well over a decade. It continued for so long, that it became a part of my natural behavior and thought process. I believed that this is who I was meant to be. It’s a decision I have begun to regret and will continue to regret for the rest of my life.

It was false pride that I had. And I think that false pride can do damage to one’s self. They say that pride is dangerous and that it can kill… I think that from the very moment I made that decision to be this “proud” person, I began to die slowly, I began to waste away. At least my soul did. Over the years, I slowly became an even more empty person because of choosing to be alone. Thankfully, I’ve realized this mistake and am now attempting to reverse it. But having lived this way for so long and believing it was the only option I ever had, it is a struggle everyday to change myself.

I’m trying to come to terms with many things in my life that have been affected both because of my stutter and my eventual decision to be a silent person. If I had only accepted and loved myself for who I truly am, then I wouldn’t have as many problems as I have now. If I had truly accepted and loved myself, then it would have been easier for me to let certain people also love and accept me. That’s another topic I plan to get into with much more detail, the fact that within the past few years I’ve met women who I could have had great relationships with, but because I was unable to accept myself, I couldn’t bring myself to understand why anyone would want to be with me. I’ve come across women who had nothing but love in their hearts for me, unconditional love that I should have cherished, but because I’ve never experienced it in the slightest bit, I became confused... confused and untrusting as to why anyone could so easily accept me. I'm certain that all that confusion and all those thoughts of unworthiness came from not ever being able to accept myself to begin with. There is nothing worse than a deep sense of regret.

Like I said before, I am truly trying to change my life for the better, but it’s difficult. Having lived this way for so long, it’s not easy to be so accepting of people or of myself… but I’m trying.

The introduction to my soul.

Hello, my name is Vincent and I stutter. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is for me to say that. Hell, “Vincent” isn’t even my real name… this blog is going to be anonymous. The reason I’m starting this blog is to let out my inner feelings about this ‘handicap’ that I have. Many of the things you’re going to read here are from the heart and are feelings that I wouldn’t ever even share to the few close friends I have… not even my present psychologist, so please, if you’re going to read this, I urge you to remember how personal this is to me. You may ask that if it’s so personal, then why release it online for the whole world to see? Well, to be honest, the first thing that comes to mind is that since I have severe trust issues (which I believe is caused by my stutter) I can’t even begin to let myself think that any friends, family, or even my psychologist really and truly give a damn about any of this, yet it is still something I need to release because I believe that everything I am going to share here could be worthwhile information to anyone else out there who stutters and may make the mistake to let it affect his or her life as much as I have let it affect mine. I also feel that in a certain way, my life experiences are quite interesting from a psychological perspective… a psychology student would have a field day if they spent a day with me and my thoughts on my stutter. I’m also doing this because I want to hear other people’s thoughts on my life, so please, if you wish to do so, then leave me comments or send me an email. Also, the last thing I would want to happen is that I leave this world without anyone knowing how I truly feel, even though this blog is anonymous.

Unfortunately, I made a mistake several years ago of becoming a very closed-off person because of my stutter. As a child, I figured that if I didn’t speak, then I wouldn’t feel the embarrassing and humiliating effects of my stutter, because let’s face it, children can be cruel. Yet that isn’t the extent of my embarrassment and humiliation. I’m sorry to mention that even family members teased me at one point or another. Think about it… my own mother mimicking my stutter for a laugh.

I’ll go into it with much more detail, but the decision I made long ago to become the “strong and silent type” is one that has harmed me more than you could ever know and it’s one that I’m barely beginning to realize and understand in regards to its effect on my life. I’ll try to describe it as well as I can, but the heartbreak that I’ve suffered over it is paralyzing, both physically and emotionally, not to mention the hurt that I feel I’ve inflicted on friends, family, romantic relationships, and other people in my life. Those last few reasons are the reasons for the creation of this blog, the fact that I’ve let it affect me so much, that it has indirectly (or perhaps directly) begun to affect other people in my life… people that do not deserve to be put through what I have put them through simply because of the outlook I have on myself.

There is one more thing that I feel I need to say in this “introduction” of sorts, and it has everything to do with what you may think is a sense of me playing the victim. There is an autobiography I read on a famous basketball player from the 60s and 70s who had a severe stutter. His name is Robert Earl Love. “Bob” Love was a tremendous basketball player for the Chicago Bulls. If you were to ask any true Chicago Bulls fan who were the top five most important players in the history of the Bulls franchise, there is a good chance they would mention Bob Love. In his book, he makes it a point to mention that he never succumbed to playing the victim. Even through all the hardships he faced such as having his wife leave him because he stuttered, to having to work as a dishwasher upon leaving the NBA because he couldn’t find any other employment that would accept him and his stutter, Bob Love is proud that he always pulled himself together and persevered despite his handicap. He eventually overcame his stutter to even become a successful motivational speaker. Bob Love’s story was truly touching to me and when I came across his opinion on choosing to never play the victim, I can truly say that I admired him a great deal. I admired him a great deal and I also felt ashamed of myself… here I am with my stutter that isn’t nowhere as bad as I make it to be, and I feel that everyday is a struggle that I wish people could know. A struggle that sends me home, after my worst days, crying and emotionally drained. Is it just that I’m an overly sensitive person? Or am I justified in thinking that this hardship I face everyday is one of the most debilitating handicaps a person could have? I’ll admit that there are times that I also feel ashamed to even call this a handicap. But you must remember, without the simplest form of communication that is speech, life IS a struggle. Not being able to share an opinion that is on my mind, not being able to speak up at work, not being able to approach an attractive woman… all these are things that I’ve experienced many times in my life. How is it possible not to let these things torment me? Obviously, I’ve already formed my opinion on that long ago, and because it’s been so long, trying to reverse the thought process that I’m a victim is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever attempted to do, and will continue to do. I’m trying to reverse it because at this point in my life (I’m in my early thirties) I’ve realized that it’s caused me nothing but harm and has made me into a bitter, untrusting, lonely, depressed person with perhaps the lowest self-esteem anyone could have. All because I never did what any smarter person would have done… accept myself for who I am and LOVE myself no matter what faults I may have.

You’ve made it this far and I thank you for reading. There will be, without a doubt, further entries. I almost feel I have enough opinions and life experiences to fill a book about my life and my stutter. If you stutter or know anyone that does stutter, I urge you to check back and read these entries as they are truly from the heart and can hopefully enlighten you on this topic. Thank you.