June 20, 2019

Post date: June 20, 2019

We had a good NSA Meeting tonight despite this horrible hard downpouring rain!  Lauren, Mike and Jane, and myself showed up at Dysart's...running through the raindrops to get there!  We welcomed back Mike and Jane from their Florida sojourn.  We spent some time checking in with each other about the past several months.  Mike, Jane and I are glad to be back in Maine after our trips.  Lauren is enjoying her daily work in the woods, but a little disappointed that starting her Cap Stone research has hit a snag due to no fault of her own!!  Talk turned to the frustration involved with stuttering when you aren't able to say what you want to say ...exactly how you want to say it.  Mike especially values  key words that can clearly send his message and is frustrated when too much stuttering sends him into inefficient circumlocutions around that word he wants to say but can't.  We have all been there! Discussion then turned to sometimes feeling inauthentic , i.e. not your real self, when using unnatural (to us) speech strategies in order more fluent.   We talked about how you can often be more fluent when you put on an "act" or "accent" or other type of "alter personality" .   We didn't bring it up in tonight's discussion, but I am now struck by the similarity of what we were saying tonight with what I have read about the many actors and TV/Movie celebrities who stutter.  They often claim that acting was  their 'way out"; their "way to be fluent".    However, it  was good to remind ourselves also that those are choices we make and that being our natural , "stuttering selves"  is also a good choice....as we can still get the message across and we are "ourselves".   Acceptance is important!