First things first, the list of D words that I will be talking about does not include THE D word, which you may expect to find in the writings of a gay man. :) Joke aside, the D words I am going to write about are Disability, Difficulty, Difference, Diversity, and Dimension. The order of their appearance in this blog is random.
Image credit: https://www.d-word.com/
Recently, I have thought a lot about who I am and what I represent. It seems that there is not a single dimension of my intersectionality that I would identify with either the most or least across settings and occasions. Rather, I wear multiple identities at the same time while de-identifying some of them over time. Here is an example.
As a child growing up with a stutter, the first thing I was worried about when I participated in a social event (family gathering, school activity, or hanging out with friends) was “what if I stutter?” “What if other people notice my stuttering?” As I mature and gradually accept myself as a person who stutters, I seem to have de-identified the “stuttering me”. Here are some of the signs of de-identification. Almost two years ago, a person who is senior to me suggested that I seek therapy for my stuttering because my switch between using a microphone and a chatbox in Zoom would be burdensome to other audiences (I chose to type the words in the chatbox that I had difficulties pronouncing). Sure, the not-knowing-how-to-say-no me accepted that suggestion and paid out of my own pocket to meet a Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP). With gratitude, I reported back to the person that “thank you for the suggestion for something that I was not aware of, and which has worsened indeed." "I started my therapy with an SLP you suggested based on your consultation with a faculty member from the department of speech and hearing science on campus..." Before I realized the suggestion was completely ableist and discriminative, or how to advocate for my challenge, I had always been appreciative of the advice on seeking therapy for my stuttering. But, what the “senior” person did not know was that I had had speech therapy before, and I discontinued it after a year of trying. Because I was only able to speak freely and fluently within the clinic but still had anxiety about speaking and stuttered a lot on the field trips outside the clinic.
My visceral doubts over the fit between the therapists’ selected contents and outcomes in English and the fact that my mother tongue is Mandarin made me think: Does the therapy really work? Did I not do enough homework on my side to achieve fluency? Are the therapy goals what I want? Am I really still concerned about how other people view the way I talk (see, I didn’t say my stuttering, but the way I talk)? I am aware of the muscular struggle when I stutter and I feel frustrated on failed utterance attempts, but is it just the way I talk? Is it just the phenotype of my neural circuits? Stuttering can be classified as a disability or a difficulty, but it is also a difference in the way I talk that distinguishes, not defines, me from others in the dimension of speech production.
From then on, I also quit myself from some stuttering support groups, either online or in-person, because of the further reconciliation with my way of speech production. Recently, I came across an essay about “stuttering is verbal diversity”1. This way of looking at stuttering further solidifies my de-identification as a person who stutters from a disability perspective but a person who speaks differently from an empowerment perspective.
I am happy to be able to contribute to the diversity and show the world the differences in human functioning.
In my previous posts, I mentioned that I am still in the closet for eight of my self-discovered identities. It indeed takes time to disclose different layers of my identity to the world. Maybe the time taken to peel them off is chronological in the sense that after I accept and reconcile with one of the identities that I was not comfortable with in the past, I will unconsciously move on to “tackling” the next one. One example was that I came out to my close circle after I decided to live with my way of talking.
So, is the “chronological” order of disclosing, de-identifying, and reconciling with identities a linear and discrete process? Not really.
Stay tuned for more in my next post.
https://www.simplepractice.com/blog/what-to-know-about-speech-therapy-for-stuttering/
Food for thought! I look forward to reading your developing thoughts on this topic.