June 2024

Post date: June 27, 2024

On Tuesday 4 of us met together on Zoom for the June Maine NSA Chapter meeting: Maisie, Natalie, Jeff, and I.  A big thanks to Natalie for sending ahead of the meeting, a video clip, from the "World Stuttering Network" FB page. In the video, Annie Hernandez gives an 18-minute talk about "Acceptance" at the 2024 StutterFest. And yes, researching about the 2024 StutterFest would also be a fun thing to do!  I don't know anything about that yet.

Anyway, I hope you all will go there and watch it - here is the link again if you missed it or didn't get a chance yet to watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq1nw8Vgpmk. Contrary to what you might automatically think when you hear the topic of "Stuttering Acceptance", it is Annie's view and the subject of her talk, that SHE doesn't accept it and works hard to "not stutter".  That's all I'll say; just watch it.

So it initiated a lot of discussion. We all agreed that there needed to be safe places for all viewpoints, perspectives, and feelings to be heard in the wide (worldwide) stuttering community. We agreed that it's in NSA's charter and it does its best to be a large umbrella encompassing all viewpoints, wanting to "offer support to all" etc. That said, we also tend to agree that there are naturally inherent biases in any kind of organization and it tends to be led by the Board of Directors and its more outspoken leaders. Thus some people on extreme ends may not feel sufficiently "heard". Or might feel "pushback" when expressing a diverging viewpoint. But neither of us 4 have had real experience with that personally. On the other hand, we also discussed that people either like to engage in conversations with opposing viewpoints or they don't. We all don't experience the same emotions when engaging in those types of engagements and discussions.   

We also certainly agreed with Annie that we don't like to stutter and the actual moment of stuttering sucks". Notwithstanding the personality features that we like about ourselves due to living through those experiences and becoming a "tough" and "compassionate" person

Her talk also generated a lot of discussion about the concept of "Acceptance" and what it means. It means different things to different people. Annie stated that "acceptance is the enemy of personal progress". She equated acceptance as "not doing anything" to improve your speech. We 4 seemed to take a broader definition and said that  "acceptance" meant you need to know who you are, accept who you are before you can move forward with change.  To deny it is to bring on fear and shame which is unhelpful and unloving towards yourself. So, Natalie came up with a different statement that we all agreed with: "Complacency is the enemy of personal progress". In addition, Annie's opinion led to several emotional moments during the discussion, as some of us / most of us continue on the journey/ moving forward to accept and love ourselves after having heard so many messages early in our lives, that "we were broken, damaged, no good, etc."  If you are on that journey, "acceptance" has a large emotional overtone.

So.... that was pretty much the meeting discussion in a large nutshell!