Dancing with My Stutter
Unlike me, she moves at her own pace that is infused with gentle refusal. My body absorbs the urgent anxiety that others radiate into the world and I shift how I inhabit each of my cells. I’m a sponge soaking up the manufactured urgency in our shared reality. Not her, she refuses. There is no hurrying her. She’ll get there when she’ll get there.
Even though I have had her in my life almost since the time I began to speak, I am still learning from her.
When I enter the room, I doubt anyone even notices. My hair is that mousy frizzy hair that somehow always seems unkempt and disappointingly indifferent no matter how much I may have invested in a shampoo that promises to cure all my ills. My face is rather unremarkable, small grey blue eyes that recede into my features. Only my nose is prominent – in fact so prominent that it was the object of ridicule of older kids in my middle school. They’d stand by the back door of the school and make a honking sound as I walked by. I like to think I’ve grown into my nose, the one that revealed my foreignness in Western Michigan. Or maybe people keep their honking sounds to themselves now.
But when she appears, everyone looks up. There is no way for her to blend into a crowded room or to be invisible. I’ve been presenting at academic conferences where everyone in the audience is basically asleep, indifferent to the droning of my voice but when she enters, they stop everything and stare.
I never know when she’ll appear. I could be having a perfectly mundane unremarkable day and find that now it is the two of us moving through it. Now, I am finding that everyone looks a little longer than if she was not there. Everything takes a little longer with her. If I am alone and something would take me 10 minutes, with her it might be twice as long.
Some days, I try to dance around her. I move elegantly swooping to the left or to the right, hoping that I can still proceed even though she is right there. But most of the time, there is no use even trying. She will stand there and insist that I stop. And start. And stop. And start again.
Whatever the rhythm we have together, I try to remember it is all just a dance. My dance alone, I can’t even imagine anymore. She has been in my life too long to imagine what my movements would be if she was not going to unexpectedly appear. Here and there and everywhere.
If she was not in my life, would I simply flow from here to there unobstructed? Would my movements be fluid and soft and silky instead of these jarring stops and goes that interrupt the demands of time? Would I manage to be invisible if she wasn’t a part of me?
Without her, I’d waltz through a room. Blue Danube dictating my movements from one thing to another, one connection to another.
All I have is my imagination because she will always be there in every moment of reaching out into the world. I hear Strauss begin to play, the bow slides along the violin’s strings and the lungs fill with air to move through the flutes, but then she appears. In a clamor, a percussion section appears. The fluidity of my movements, my body, my gaze, and my presence is punctuated by the vibrancy of her unpredictable ways.
We are no longer swaying through the room languidly; we are now plucked into Sun Ra Arkestra’s Love in Outer Space. The drums and the saxophone dip and swerve and the keys of keyboard punchily stitch the layers together in a tapestry of independent movements that lean into each other. Unlike the Blue Danube, Sun Ra Arkestra listens and anticipates the way each instrument might need room to stretch out, or maybe a single sound wants to explore time in a new way. The Arkestra anticipates and embraces the dip, the jag, the sway, the linger, the stuck, and the repeat.
I fantasize about flowing like the Blue Danube but I halt, and rock, and jump, and leap like Sun Ra Arkestra. When she is here, I can’t always anticipate where the conversation might go. I can’t turn the page of the sheet of music and simply pick up the notes where they were left off. I have to pause and listen and feel my way through every encounter with her.
Much of this world is designed as though we should all take out our music sheets and glide through our days. Many seem to be turning the sheets successfully and react to the sudden percussive interruption of her presence with confusion. Still, I show up to the conferences, stand in front of the classrooms. Where each person performs smoothly, waltzes on the stage and through the dialogue. The two of us, we begin to flip the sheets but have to go back, use the flute as a drum stick instead of a wind instrument, we toss out the sheet altogether and begin to bounce in place.
To soften the faces of those witnessing this performance, I used to imagine that we were on a trampoline, bouncing, bouncing, bouncing joyfully in place as people sat so still in front of us. I no longer imagine us on a trampoline, maybe that joy is not something I can invite strangers into who just want me to take the music sheet and blow smoothly through the opening on the flute, following the notes in front of me. Now, I glide into the room, let moments of the blue danube flow in the spaces between us and weave the blue danube with Sun Ra Arkestra’s responsive layers embracing each other, allowing each instrument to be what they need to be, to move or to stop, or to linger, or to pause, or to stretch out like a loved cat in the warmth of the sunshine on a windowsill.
“Maybe your brother and sister hit you too hard,” my grandma would muse about my stutter when I was a little girl. I do not have any memories of my siblings causing me physical harm but instead recall this loving speculation with fondness. She tried to explain why I could not speak like other little girls my age. She spoke more to herself than me, but I heard her confusion and care.
“Slow down,” teachers in middle school would unhelpfully instruct when I spoke.
My best friend hit me with a #2 pencil every time I stuttered in high school English. We had just learned about classical conditioning in our psychology course and she thought she’d try out a simple punishment practice on me.
Most often these days, people uncomfortably stare and complete my sentences, often with the wrong words.
I have learned to love the music we make together, other people’s interruption is another instrument that leaps into the piece we are creating together. I can feel my stutter approach, I see her several steps ahead of me, and quite frequently adjust my steps, reach for a different word, perhaps one that is a tad awkward or at least unexpected. Sometimes, I simply just have to continue with my steps knowing that I will be stopped in my tracks. Sometimes the sound repeats, other times, as is often the case with my own name, my mouth just sits agape. My expression is frozen but the dance goes on. Stillness, the absence of movement and sound, is too a part of the dance.
As a professor, my students meet me with nothing but appreciation.
“It feels good to have someone embrace their disability,” they tell me.
She embraced me first, I want to say. But instead, I simply thank them.
During conference talks, I worry that my stutter becomes the story rather than my theory or my methods. But I keep showing up. Because maybe someone will join the dance in a way that doesn’t trample my toes.
At the last conference I attended, a group of kind audience members watched as I labored through my written talk. Rather than talking organically, which might allow me to dip out of her way when she approaches, to replace a word that feels like a stutter with something close enough, I chose to read my paper. The topic was too important for me and I was afraid of losing any of the delicate sentences and issues I carefully constructed. The person timing my talk gently reminded me when I was approaching my time, as I repeated a single consonant over and over again.
“I don’t have a question, but that was poignant,” one audience member said when it was time for a dialogue. No one else raised their hands to ask a question. Perhaps they wanted me to have the relief of sitting down or perhaps they were trying to relieve themselves of having to watch my contorted face hold a single letter prisoner. They seemed afraid of me.
After times like this I wonder why I keep dancing. Why do I keep showing up, knowing that other people’s Blue Danube is not available to me. But then I remember how liberating Sun Ra Arkestra is. How each instrument is allowed to be unpredictable and is no less held by all the other instruments. Isn’t that a beautiful world being dreamed up by Marshall Allen even at the age of 101?
I was in the audience at a Brooklyn art space where Sun Ra Arkestra performed. Marshall Allen at this point holds the Guinness World Record for being the oldest performer. He did not miss a beat because the beats around him adjusted, each member listened and met his notes where they were, held his notes, let the notes spread out, or speed up. He sat, he stood, he swayed, he was part of the whole.
The stilted fantasy of the Blue Danube has never reflected life as it is lived, nature as it is. Maybe it was for the Viennese ballrooms with the puffy skirts and the corsets. In this world, the one I want to share with you, I want our notes to be free, free to stop, free to move on, free to stall, free to repeat, and I want each of us to be present enough to know how to hold what that note needs to feel in the moment.
I’m not sure I’ve fallen in love with her yet. I don’t think that’s the point. I am part of this improvised yet orchestrated dance, and I’m learning to love the view from wherever she might fling me in any given encounter.
She embraced me first, before I knew how to embrace myself. Now I’m embodying the possibility, the celebration actually, that there’s more than one way to move through this world, that the most beautiful music often comes from learning to listen to each other’s unexpected rhythms and finding ways to harmonize rather than forcing everyone to keep the same time.
Isn’t that what love is, after all? Learning to dance together, even when, especially when, the steps aren’t what anyone expected?
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About the Author
Emese Ilyés is a participatory action researcher and critical psychologist who has been living and learning with her stutter since childhood. Her work explores ways communities resist oppression and dehumanization. She identifies as disabled and is passionate about creating more inclusive spaces in academia and beyond.