Welcome to meet-this-stuttering-character! This blog is meant to spread awareness about all the amazing characters with a stutter and create a comfortable space on Tumblr for everyone who stutters | Submissions open! | The blog is on an indefinite hiatus
I present you another do-you-know-this-thing blog, but this one is dedicated to characters who stutter. I’ve noticed an extreme lack of stuttering representation both in media and here on Tumblr, and my goal is to change it with this blog.
First, a little about me.
I’m a stutterer myself. I’ve been stuttering since childhood, and now when I’m an adult, my stutter starts to severely affecting the quality of my life. It made me actively fight it since last year, I was in therapy and took medication, but there were no visible improvements. Currently, I’m learning how to accept my stutter and live a full life in spite of it.
I don’t know whether this blog will become a thing, so I’d prefer not to reveal either my main blog or my nickname for now, but you can refer to me by using she/her pronouns. I also want to point out that English is not my first language, so if I mess up or use the wrong terminology, forgive me, I’m genuinely sorry. Feel free to correct me, though.
And now, about the blog.
For now, my plan is to post one poll weekly. I’ll wait until the middle of June, and if there are no submissions, I’ll start posting the characters that I find myself in hope more people will learn about the blog and get interested in it.
I haven’t created a google form yet, since I want to start gathering submissions through my askbox. However, if more people prefer google forms, I can always create it. I can work with whatever.
Submission requirements.
Your submission needs to include the character’s name, the character’s picture, and the name of media they’re from. If you can also provide a video fragment where it’s clearly heard that your character is indeed a stutterer, that would be great (but it’s optional, so please, don’t feel pressured).
I will not accept real people unless they’re from a movie/book about a historical figure. My priority is fictional characters. However, your character can be from any kind of media, whether it’s a movie, a book, a video game, or anything else.
I will not accept characters who just pretend to be a stutterer. Their stutter must be real otherwise it’s just pointless.
A few things to add.
I haven’t met a single person on Tumblr who stutters, so I also want to create sort of a stuttering community here. If you’re comfortable with sharing your experience about your stutter with me and everyone else here, feel free to send a message! Really, I’ll gladly listen to all of your stories and I’m sure that other stutterers will be happy to know that they’re not alone.
For now, my profile picture is Bill Denbrough from It. I know nothing about this guy except for the fact that he stutters, so if he’s not good representation, let me know and feel free to suggest any other character that you want to see as this blog profile picture. My header is the sea, and it has nothing to do with stuttering, I just love the sea.
I was inspired to create this blog by:
@do-you-know-this-adhd-character
@doyouknowthisdisabledcharacter
@doyoulikethissong-poll
@doyouknowthischaracter
If you can spread the word, I will highly appreciate it!
That’s it! Thank you everyone for your attention, I’m really excited to start working on this blog and meet all of you.
I think one of the worst things about stuttering is how misunderstood it is. Just told my uni teacher I cannot attend some random conference tomorrow because I’m working on my stutter and have speech therapy sessions on Saturdays to which he replied, “Oh I didn’t notice you stutter, though maybe a bit, I think it’s actually cute.”
Hey! How's your speech been post-treatment? And is there a name for the kind of program you went through?
Thank you so much for asking!
Well, as much as I saw improvements when I was still doing all those exercises, reading out loud, and talking with strangers, right now my speech is pretty much the same it was before treatment i.e. I still stutter. First, I noticed it when doing public speaking at my university and then in all other situations in which I usually stutter (for example, when making orders or simply saying goodbye when I leave some building). It keeps going downhill unless I do all those exercises regularly again.
I admit I was disappointed because I did put all my energy and free time I had then into my treatment. Even though I wasn’t entirely sure I’d get 100% results, deep inside I still hoped for it. But well, it only confirmed that stuttering is indeed a very complex disorder and you can’t get rid of it completely even if you’re practicing for four hours daily for 1,5 months.
Anyway, I’m also not saying it was useless. I still do some of those exercises, just a lot less regularly, and it does have a positive impact on my speech. As I was saying before, I don’t believe that stuttering is curable (and my personal experience keeps and keeps confirming it) but it can be controlled, and those exercises do a nice job when it comes to reducing it.
The program I went through was developed by speech therapists, therapists, and pharmacists from my country and as I know it’s only available in my native language, which is not English, so I don’t know how helpful it will be for you to know what it’s called. But if you’re interested, I can write a separate post about its structure and what exercises it had. All those exercises are pretty traditional and often used to treat stuttering so I don’t think it will be considered copyright infringement or anything.
My treatment is slowly coming to an end (September 4 is the last day) and I can clearly sense that my speech has gotten a lot smoother but somehow having a smooth speech doesn’t turn me into a loud and talkative extrovert akdngkgkifnf.
Week one is complete. Each day consists of different types of exercises:
1) breathing exercises
2) articulation exercises
3) voice exercises
+ manual alphabet.
Week two is called “a period of silence” which means I won’t be speaking at all for the next seven days. In the context of this course they say it’s done for the purpose to let your brain “forget” about stuttering because they believe stuttering is a habit, as in we simply got used to speaking with a stutter due to the referral activity of the larynx muscles.
For the next few weeks I’ll be basically learning how to speak again from scratch, following several rules. I’ll tell you about them when I actually get to them.
Anyway, for now this course seems to actually make sense.
I think it would be more fair to finally make an official announcement and say that this blog is on an indefinite hiatus now, which means there will be no updates in the near future. I have too many things going on in my real life now and several projects I want to work on but don’t have enough time for, and unfortunately, I won’t have enough energy for running this blog until I have at least a half of stuff in my pile resolved.
However, I will still accept submissions if anyone ever wants to submit a character and I will still answer asks about stuttering and talk about my experience as a stutterer if anyone is interested to hear from me.
Thank you everyone who’s still following this blog and for your understanding.
Hi, I relate to your blog so much, I've also lived with a severe stutter my whole life. Did you ever try those audio delaying machines with a headset/microphone in speech therepy and if you did, did it help in any way? Also if you have any speech tips I'd be rlly happy to hear them 😭
Thank you so much for your question! As I said in my pinned post, I'm running this blog not only for making polls but also for sharing my experience and chatting with other people who stutter so your message really made my day.
I admit I never used any anti-stuttering devices, though I heard and read a lot about them and even considered getting one for myself and asking my speech therapist for advice. But at some point it slipped off my mind because my speech was getting significantly better so it didn't seem like a necessity anymore. I'm seeing my therapist next Tuesday so I can ask her about the DAF and other assistive technologies for stutterers (because this one is not the only one) and then write a separate post about it if you and other people on the blog are interested in it.
But from what I heard about DAF, its main purpose is to make a wearer slow down their speech and gain more control over it but this is something my therapist and I practice during our sessions without any device so I feel like it won’t be a necessity for most stutterers.
As for general tips, I planned on writing a separate post about my journey in speech therapy but I don’t know when it happens since my course is still going so I’ll share some tips now. I learned about them in therapy and personally they help me so I really hope it will help you too.
The post turned out long so the tips are under the cut.
1. Regardless of how trivial it sounds, speech therapy exercises are crucial. They do help because they serve as a warmup and help you prepare for your future communication. You wouldn’t perform a complicated physical exercise without doing a warmup or stretching first. My typical routine includes three types of such exercises: breathing exercises, voice exercises, and articulation exercises (which include all your jaw, lips, and tongue).
There is a great variety of breathing exercises but my therapist and I practice these ones: square breathing (inhale for four seconds, hold your breath for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, hold your breath for four seconds, and so on), 4-7-8 breathing (in my language we call it a triangle breathing) (inhale for four seconds, hold your breath for seven seconds, exhale for eight seconds, and so on), blowing out candles from some distance (we do the same with small felt balls) , and blowing on a tissue lying on a back. For those two last exercises you’ll need a straw since you’re supposed to exhale through a straw.
As for voice exercises, it’s important to practice speaking in a deeper voice. Some of the exercises I do in therapy include singing vowels, gradually changing the pitch of your voice (you start singing at your lowest pitch and gradually raise the pitch of your voice until you reach the highest and then you do it from the highest to the lowest), gradually raising the volume of your voice, starting from the quietest to the loudest, and singing all vowels in one breath (we also add constants before the vowels, it looks something like this: a-o-e-u-i and for example, pa-po-pe-pu-pi).
And as for articulation, it’s important to open your jaw wide. For this purpose we have two exercises: putting your fist in your mouth for twenty seconds (but obviously you can’t fit your fist into your mouth, you just open it as wide as possible) and opening your jaw twenty times as your lips are spread into a wide smile. There is a great variety of tongue and lips exercises, I really don’t think I’ll be able to remember everything we do during our sessions but some of the most obvious ones are just moving your tongue and lips to different directions.
Of course these exercises are not something that you can use when you start stuttering when you have public speaking, a phone call, or anything else that involves speaking. It’s recommended to do these exercises in the morning since they’re meant to help you prepare to speak and energize you for the rest of the day.
2. Tips that you can use when you start stuttering in the moment. I admit it’s extremely difficult to control your stutter once your chest is already tightened and it feels like you can’t say anything. My therapist told me about some techniques, and out of three of them there’s just one that actually helps me but maybe you’ll find them helpful.
One of them is prolonging the first vowel of the first word in a sentence (the one that helps me). It looks like this: Heeello. Iii’m running a blog about stuttering. When I just started my course, my speech was exaggeratedly slow and kinda unnatural since I had to prolong vowels a lot but as the time passed, I prolonged them less and less and now it’s barely noticeable (at times I don’t even need it, I can speak fluently without it).
Another one is starting your sentences with a loud exhale that sounds like a sigh. It’s hard to explain but you need to start speaking at the same time as you’re making a sigh and simultaneously sharply lowering your shoulders. It’s not really usable in any situation I’m usually involved in but maybe it works for casual conversations with people you know and you don’t want your stutter to interfere.
And the last one is the one that I don’t really understand myself :’D It’s similar to the first tip but instead of prolonging the vowels you mutter. It’s something like this: Errr-ello. Err-I’m running a blog about stuttering. If the word starts with a consonant, this consonant is barely audible, it melts into muttering. Personally, it sounds a lot less natural than prolonging but you can try it to see if it works for you.
Another tip is giving yourself permission to stop and take a breath. You need to give yourself some time to recharge and think about how you may reduce your stutter at least for the next few minutes. Regardless of how annoying it sounded even to me, you need to slow down your speech and take a deep breath. It does help because it reduces tension caused by a stutter.
3. Community. I don’t know if you can afford speech therapy and have group sessions but nonetheless, it’s important to find a place where you can communicate with people and discuss various topics with them. I think a book club or a movie club may be a good alternative. When you feel more comfortable about your speech, you may go to a restaurant or to the cinema and order/buy stuff yourself. I was pretty self-isolating my whole life and got more independent basically only this year and the fact that I can order food or ask a question to a stranger on the streets was very empowering.
4. General tips. If you do public speaking, put written pauses in your text. Those are a slash that’s used for a short pause within a long sentence and a double slash that’s used for the end of a sentence. For example: Hello.// I’m running a blog/ about stuttering.//
For the love of universe don’t forget about your physical health. One of the first things that I noticed about my stutter was that it got much worse when I didn’t get enough sleep. Of course eight hours of sleep didn’t cure me but at least helped me not to stutter at every word. It also applies to nutrition and physical activity, spending more time outside can actually help you. Another thing that helped me was meditation and keeping a diary since it made me more self-aware.
It’s difficult, and I don’t always follow it myself but you need to accept the fact that you stutter and not be ashamed of it. My therapist constantly tells me that I need to let other people know that I stutter because there’s nothing wrong with it. Of course there are jerks everywhere but if someone is being mean to you only because you stutter, it’s obvious that they’re not your person. Usually people are neutral and don’t care about your stutter but sometimes they may even show sympathy. There is one person in my surrounding who got more understanding towards me when she found out that my “abnormal” speech was caused by a stutter so really, you never know how somebody reacts to your stutter unless you directly tell them.
Thank you again for your question! I really hope I managed to help you and I wish you all the luck on your journey!!!
