![My stutter, Myself](https://cdn.magzter.com/Reader's Digest India/1714984883/articles/2YrOYxzIX1714994874572/MY-STUTTER-MYSELF.jpg)
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?
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Denne historien er fra May 2024-utgaven av Reader's Digest India.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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ME & MY SHELF
Chitra Divakaruni is the author of 23 books including The Forest of Enchantment, Mistress of Spices and Palace of Illusions. Her latest book is An Uncommon Love: The Early Life of Sudha and Narayan Murthy.
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Suggestions about life are a little like lottery tickets: You may collect a lot of them, but they rarely pay off. Yet if you are truly lucky, you receive a few words of wisdom that inspire you forever. That's called hitting the jackpot
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