For years I labeled myself as a stutterer. But I was so much more. I was a son and a brother. A Boy Scout and a runner. I was an A/B student. Still, I defined myself by my obstacle.
I wanted to think of myself as someone working on my fluency. That was a change I made inside my own head, while I was still stuttering.
The words I used for myself
One way I have put it is a person who currently stutters. Another is a person who's working on his fluency. I wanted my way of describing myself to leave room for the work I was doing and the future I wanted.
How could I become fluent while still thinking of myself as a stutterer? That did not make sense to me. I had carried that identity for years, and I did not want it to be the whole picture of who I was.
I kept the change in my own head
I didn't make a big announcement to my friends and family. I kept it with me. I've described it as making me feel 1% better: just a little bit better that hope was possible.
That mattered to me. I was already having a constant conversation with myself about my speech. The way I talked to myself was part of what I had to work on.
This went alongside practice and the work on my beliefs. I changed how I described myself before I had the fluency I wanted. It was one of the steps I took while I was learning.
The picture I used in one group call
I asked the group to picture their life as a ruler, a timeline. Think about the age when the stuttering started and the years from then until now. They didn't have to tell me the number.
Then I described putting a long balloon around those years and tying it off. Inside it were the beliefs I was talking about: it's hard to talk, I get humiliated, I can't say my name. The bad memories and the self-talk were in that picture too.
I asked them to imagine the balloon drifting away, slowly, until they could hardly see it. Then I brought in the thought of being someone working on their fluency. I wanted them to keep that thought inside first.
I said right there that I had never described it that way before. I was trying to explain the change in identity I had made. I also said it took time and that there was a lot of work in the mind and in real practice.
When someone already thought of themselves differently
A person in that call said their case was different because they had started stuttering as an adult. Their identity was already there. They had been thinking that the stuttering was a phase and that it would pass.
I came back to my own experience of worrying about speech. I said that their way of thinking about it had been different from mine and that I could only say what it was like for me. Then I asked whether they remembered anything about when it began, and said it was okay if they didn't want to talk about it.
How I think about who we are
I've also written that we are defined by how we treat others. Be gentle and kind. Our past failures and successes don't define us. I was all those other things I had named, and I also stuttered. I was a combination of definitions.
The words you use for yourself
Thinking of myself as a person working on his fluency helped me leave room for change. That was my choice. Calling yourself a stutterer does not establish what you can or cannot achieve, and you can be open about your speech while working toward your goals.