Stuttering Spotlight- DeeDee Scalzetti

Happy Thursday!!

I’m excited to share our friend DeeDee’s story today. She is truly an inspiring person and I was entirely captivated when reading her submission in my email inbox. She wanted to introduce herself:

My name is DeeDee Scalzetti and I am a Person Who Stutters. I used to believe that sentence would dictate how I could exist in the world, but then I decided I had to find a way to live in defiance of my own self-imposed limitations. I have since traveled solo through sixteen countries, spent six years working with court involved youth on the SouthSide of Chicago, and currently work as an Investigator with the Public Defender’s Office in Portland, Oregon.

Resistance to Release - The spiral of healing in a second language.

There is a resistance inside of me. I've felt it as long as I can remember. It must have been there since before I was born and I can't help but feel I've carried it with me through many lifetimes. It's nothing I can put my finger on, just an undercurrent, a theme in my life, that manifests itself in different ways. I'm always ready to oppose, to defend, embodying the raccoon-like energy of, "cute but will fight,” whether that kind of enthusiasm is warranted or not. Resistance is good when it comes to certain things, of course. Like when I know someone is trying to take advantage of me or when it's time to protest injustice in the streets. But it becomes harmful when I use my own resistance against myself. When I unconsciously resist my own growth, sabotaging my personal evolution. Yet it's not always easy to recognize when this shift in the dynamic of resistance has taken place. Because people can rationalize anything. And I for one am damn good at rationalizing the hell out of things I am not yet ready to face.

I rationalized my resistance to being a Person Who Stutters for eighteen years. When I was nine, I didn't want to accept that this disjointed way of speaking that had suddenly started forcing it's way out of my mouth is how I would have to present myself to the world for the rest of my life. I tried to hide my stutter whenever I could and even when I clearly couldn't. Because I didn't understand it. Because I was scared. Because I was ashamed. Because I felt inadequate and broken and alone. I held out hope for years that something, some day, would magically cure me. But nothing did. The only thing that ever eventually made a difference was me. When I finally decided to release my resistance and embrace stuttering as a part of who I am.

The process wasn't easy. It was a one step forward, two steps back type of situation. Even though I had decided to explore acceptance to the flow of my words, my stutter had not, and it continued its relentless resistance to the flow of neurons in my brain as they tried to connect to synapses. My first step, at twenty-seven years old, was to return to speech therapy. I knew a few things were important if I was going to do this: one was that speech therapy had to be on my own terms and the second was that it had to come from an acceptance-based approach, the kind that had previously been taboo in the speech therapy I'd received as a kid. When I was young, the speech therapy my parents took me to was focused on "fixing the problem." The problem being the stutter, of course, but at that age I couldn't separate the sounds from myself. I was the one stuttering. It was my head that twitched, my eyes that closed, my jaw that clenched for seconds that spanned hours when the words wouldn't come out. To my young mind, the problem stutter was part of who I was, so if that's what we were trying to fix here, then the problem was me.

At the time, this kind of therapy was all that was really known. It's not like my parents intentionally picked a harmful approach or that they even consciously knew what they were doing. There wasn't as much information then as there is now. The therapists told them something was "fixable" and we're inclined to believe experts when they give their expert opinions. But the real problem was that stuttering is a neurological disorder and it is absolutely and unequivocally not fixable. It can be eased with education and acceptance but there is no way to eliminate it entirely. The therapists were selling my parents a pipe dream. They were making money by means of bold promises they had no way of keeping and I was bearing the brunt of the incompetence, because stutters kept coming out of my mouth.

So when I say going back to speech therapy as an adult had to be on my own terms, I mean I had to call the shots. I chose the company, I selected my therapist, I paid my own way. I knew this would only work if it was completely for me, from me.

The second step of this process was to go to my first therapy session and sob for hours to a stranger as I unpacked eighteen years of inner turmoil. Everything I did to shrink, all the times I swallowed my words, every moment I froze and let ridicule and mockery cover me like a blanket. Yet this stranger would very quickly become not just an amazing therapist, but a great friend. She had a stutter, too. She knew. Even if I hadn't said a word, she would have known. And that changed everything.

Over the course of the next six months, my therapist encouraged me to do the unthinkable: Stutter. As much or as little as my brain told me I was meant to. She encouraged me to tell people I stuttered. She motivated me to explain my stutter when I felt comfortable doing so and provided me with the knowledge I had lacked for so long regarding my own condition. With her, I was able to deconstruct all of the fear and discomfort and inadequacy I had encompassed my speech with and eventually reached a point where I felt empowered by my stutter. Because I had finally found my people. My therapist introduced me to support groups and national conferences just for people who stuttered. Just for people like me. I wasn't alone. I never had been. And I would never feel like I was again.

I progressed out of speech therapy with what felt like a new lease on my life. It was a quiet liberation. I mentored other young people who stuttered and came to a point where I felt like those past struggles didn't have a such a hard and fast hold on me anymore. Until the day they came back with a vengeance.

A few years later, while traveling long term, I started learning Spanish as a second language and unknowingly opened a dangerous door to my past. Learning a new language inherently requires you to look stupid when first speaking. Never before spoken words and unfamiliar sounds cause your mouth to form shapes it isn't used to, which is extremely difficult for someone who stutters. A new language necessitates you to be unsure, to say things wrong, to have native speakers look at you funny and wonder what the hell you're trying to say. Speaking mistakes are part of the learning process. But for me, mistakes when speaking weren't simply mistakes. They contained all of my biggest worries, all the feelings I had fought so hard to overcome. Every single fear, anxiety and shamed-filled, speech-based belief came rushing back into my life like they had never left. I couldn't focus on learning the new vocabulary or conjugations or the changing tenses. All I could obsessively think about was my stutter. I didn’t even have the words to say I stuttered in Spanish, let alone the words to explain it. It felt like I was nine years old again, terrified, back to square one. Is this really what I wanted?

I didn't know how to be back in this space. So I resisted it. I didn't practice my Spanish when I should have outside of the classroom. I reverted back to English in social situations even when I should have put in more effort. I let myself be completely overcome, again, by the suffocating blanket of shrinking and swallowing my words because I didn't feel adequate enough to release and say it. Even if it came out wrong. Even if no one understood. Even if everyone laughed.

My dilemma was that as much as I wanted to avoid those paralyzing feelings, I had to feel them all over again. As much as I never wanted to think those unworthy thoughts again, I had to contemplate them. If learning another language was my goal, then I had to do the things that scared me the most, even though I’d already done them. Healing once doesn’t send you on your way. If I know anything about the process of healing, it's that nothing is linear. When we commit to doing the work of deep inner transformation, we mend ourselves on a spiral. As Barry H. Gillespie said, "You continuously come back to the things you thought you understood to see deeper truths." Here I was spiraling back. And now was the critical moment where I would have to decide how deep of a truth about myself I was willing to see.

In the course of the past year, I've taken over 100 hours of Spanish lessons in different parts of Mexico and Guatemala. Some places I found good teachers and some places I found okay teachers. But there was one place I found an amazing teacher. While studying in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, I was living in a homestay with a wonderful Guatemaltecan family and enrolled in an intensive course at Utatlan Language School. My teacher, Jorge, was the rowdiest of all the teachers at the school. He was animated and bright and loved not taking either life or languages much too seriously. So when I confided in him about my stutter, to prepare him that at times it might sound very difficult for me to speak, he looked at me in the most curious way. After contemplating me for a few moments, Jorge said something that shook me to my core. He said, "But in certain Spanish dialects, the way your name is pronounced, DiDi, is a common phrase for telling someone to speak."

I was dumbfounded. I asked Jorge, quite fluently, if he was f*cking with me. With a deep laugh, he assured me he was not. He said when I had initially introduced myself to him as DeeDee, he had been tickled to have a student in a language class that was named after the activity. "DiDi!" can translate to, "Say!" or "Talk!" and is used to give someone the space to share their thoughts in the course of a conversation. Talk about a god damn revelation. I sat there that day at a loss for words, though not in my usual sense. I couldn't process the irony. This whole time in this new language I had struggled so much to befriend, I have quite literally been called, Talk.

So finally, I started to.

There are times I still try to hide my stutter. Sometimes the fear creeps back in and I respond in my old, covert way, and I'm so good at it from nearly two decades of practice that many new people I meet say they never even knew I stuttered. But that way of life is exhausting and it doesn't put the words I want people to hear out into the world. I'm a work in progress when it comes to this. I suppose within the spiral of healing, I always will be. But I can definitively say that without my stutter, I never would have met the people I have in this life. I wouldn't be able to relate to the world in the unique way that I do. I know I wouldn't have this crazy and insatiable curiosity to explore, to always look past the surface, of places and of people, for more. My stutter is not all of me, but it has made me who I am. And in releasing my resistance to it, it doesn't stop me anymore, in this language or any other. I stutter when I stutter and then I keep it moving.

After all, words are just words. Words we say, words we write, words we read. They can mean nothing or they can mean everything. They contain the power we choose to give them. What matters within words is the way they make you feel. How certain words strung together in exactly the right sequence can change the chemistry of your heart. Deep in my heart, I know the particular combination of being a Person Who Stutters and a solo traveler has taught me one vitally important thing; No one is going to live my life but me. So I have the choice. Say the things, or don't. Go to the places, or stay home. Meet the people, or miss the magical connections. Resist, or release. The world is wide open. And it's ready to listen.