Finding New Blogs

While in the process of reading user comments that I've missed to some of my older posts, I've discovered a whole slew of new blogs and websites. You can view some of them in my list of links in the left-hand column. I enjoy other people's blogs...reading of their most personal stuttering experiences, ones they don't mind sharing, and also getting insight into how they think and how they feel about their own experience. I also like it when they come up with interesting titles to their blog. "My Stupid Mouth" is particularly good and would make a great title for a book on stuttering. I enjoyed his recent post about using the telephone and how it is a symbol of fear and frustration for most stutterers.

I also enjoyed his recent post on Celebrity Stutterers...and I share some of his thoughts. I have been somewhat skeptical of the exhaustive lists of famous stutterers, wondering if some of them had or have a stutter that is what most of us chronic stutterers know of as a "stuttering problem". Most of us have had many people tell us, after finding out that we stutter, that they stutter as well...as most people do (they say). Well, we know that that is bunk. What these people are talking about are moments of dysfluency...the sort that everyone has now and again. This is not true stuttering, however. I believe that they say this to us in order to make us feel better. In reality, however, this statement serves to diminish or trivialize what is a very real and debilitating affliction.

It's not that we want to revel in the affliction. It's that we want it taken seriously. Everyone in the world stumbles and trips over their feet now and then. But, wouldn't it be silly to say that it makes us crippled or handicap?