Blueberry Smoothie

“Good morning, welcome to The Daily Dose. How may I help you,” the barista beamed warmly at me from behind the counter.

“Hi, may I have a b… b…”

The sound abruptly stopped in my throat, refusing to continue its journey like a petulant child on the first day of school. I tried putting more force into the syllable but nothing happened. Nothing. It was as if there had been an invisible string wrapped tightly around my throat. From behind the counter, the barista stared at me perplexedly, his eyes filled with impatience and confusion. In a panic, I pretended to cough - a tactic I had developed over the years to buy myself some more time. “Think, Nha. Think. Be calmer. Speak slower.” The oh-so-familiar advice circled my mind like vultures. If only I could be calmer. If only I could speak slower. As heat started to rise in my cheeks and my heart palpitated wildly, I scrambled my mind to find a word - any words that could patch up my already broken sentence. Like a clumsy thief, I hastily ransacked through every nook and cranny of my jumbled brain, but I found nothing but incomprehensible fragments and the deafening scream of my inner voice. “Think, Nha. Think. Be calmer. Speak slower.” Maybe it was not a good idea to come here in the first place. Maybe I did not need that drink after all. Maybe I could just run away and pretend this did not happen. And maybe if I ran fast enough, I could escape this embarrassment, this shame, this impediment that had haunted me all my life...

“I’ll have a blueberry smoothie please. Thank you so much.”

And just like that, out of nowhere, the words poured out of my mouth like butter on warm toast. Smoothly. Effortlessly. In a blink of an eye, the obstruction that had once been there varnished as if I had been hallucinating all along. However, from the odd look the barista gave me, I knew that the damage had already been done.

For me, this is how it feels to have a stutter. Stuttering is not as simple as repeating a syllable or prolonging certain sounds. It is the heart-wrenching, mind-numbing, soul-crushing fear that at any random moment, words just will not come out of my mouth no matter how hard I try. I have been stuttering for as long as I can remember, so I do not know how it feels to be “normal”, to say a sentence without skirting around the difficult words, without the crippling fear that what I want to say may never get through, without the shame, the helplessness, the desperation as I stand there, trying to get out a word a 5-year-old can probably say without hesitation.

Growing up with a stutter is a constant struggle. I have lost count of times when my stuttering stops me from speaking up my mind or reaching out to new friends. At times, it feels as if stuttering were a muzzle over my mouth, silencing me, suffocating me. By the time I reached high school, I was beyond frustrated. I hated that I had an arsenal of different ways to avoid talking to people, that I turned away as soon as somebody made eye contact with me. I remembered that for my 16th birthday, my ma bought me a memoir of a renowned public speaker who stuttered as a child. That book gave me so much hope throughout my tumultuous teenage years. It made me believe that with patience and diligence, I might stand a chance of getting better, of living a stutter-free life. Foolishly, I thought that there was an expiry date to this curse, that I could leave this stuttering nightmare behind as I entered the threshold of adulthood. Spoiler alert, nothing changed!

Staring at the number 21 on my birthday cake, I wondered what the future might hold for me - an adult stutterer. At this point, I had come to accept that I might never grow out of my stuttering, that this impediment is, after all, a part of my identity. With that realization, I was confronted with two paths: letting my stutter condemn me to a vicious cycle of self-loathing and resentment, or learning to embrace this flaw. Standing at the crossroad, I weighed my options carefully. For all my life, I had been so familiar with the first path. Every bend, every corner, every surface of it seemed to be deeply imprinted on my mind. But when I looked at the second path, I felt a strange pull. The unfamiliar path felt as an invitation to me, like it wanted me to explore it. I closed my eyes and followed my heart. At that moment, it felt like it was not my feet that carried me. It was the yearning in my heart that lifted my soul and moved my body. I took a step, and another one, and another one. Before I knew it, I was trudging through the untraveled road, my soles caressing the unworn ground. Between the decadent soil and the never-ending azure sky, amidst the thick overgrowth, for the first time ever, I felt free.

Today I am no longer ashamed of my stutter. I am proud of the arduous journey I have been through to finally see myself beyond my fragmented speech. Yes, I am a stutterer, but I will not let that be my only defining character. I am a reader, a writer, a teacher who also happens to stutter. At the end of the day, what matters most to me is that I will never run away from myself ever again. Maybe it will take a bit longer for me to order my favourite drink at the coffee shop, but after all, I know I will always be rewarded with the sweet taste of that heavenly blueberry smoothie.