My stutter, Myself

If others don't notice my stutter, can I really call myself a stutterer?

- Isabel Armiento

I was walking to my home in Toronto when a well-dressed man politely stopped me to ask for directions.

"Could you tell me which way to Bloor and..." He struggled to get the next word out, a pained look on his face, but I knew better than to finish his sentence for him.

"... Bathurst?" he said after several seconds of straining. When I started to answer, he told me that he didn't actually need to know. He was practising stuttering openly, he explained, hoping to become more confident doing so around strangers.

I lit up with excitement. "Are you doing that because it's National Stuttering Awareness Day?" I asked, always eager to connect with other people who stutter. When the man asked how I knew that, I said that I grew up with a stutter.

He nodded, looking a bit wistful: "And I suppose your stutter has magically disappeared since then?"

His question gave me pause. I understood why he assumed this-when compared to his fairly severe stutter, I sounded fluent, stutter-free. But even as we spoke, my stutter had influenced my speech: For example, I'd misnamed International Stuttering Awareness Day as National Stuttering Awareness Day to avoid the tricky front vowel sound at the beginning of the word-a sound I continue to struggle with.

And while it's true that my stutter was more noticeable when I was a child, this was partially because I'd since found workarounds for difficult words and sounds, helping me hide the worst of it.

When I answered his question, I opted for the simplest explanation: that I had grown out of my stutter. But was this true?