Shit to Compost……
Trauma to Superpower
Being a kid who stuttered, being a teenager who stuttered, being a young adult who stuttered crafted me, created me, made me into who I am today in massively and monumentally powerful ways.
I don’t remember not stuttering. As far back as my memories lead me, talking was tribulation. Talking was—vulnerability, exposure, and potential violation.
Talking was terrifying.
The context is so important. I was a child in the 50’s. Younger folks reading this, that would be the 1950’s. My parents, Tillie and Sidney Futuronsky, were good people who did their best, who adored my sister and me more than themselves. (That could fill several books). They were told by the doctors to not pay attention to my stuttering.
They were told by the doctors to not pay attention to my stuttering!
How could you not pay attention to a child’s stuttering?
Every word I said could potentially burst open my family’s collective denial. And many words did, for many years. Their silence was a heavy load to hold alone.
I don’t have many memories of my parents talking to me about my speech. My dad, the kindest man alive on the planet at that time, was a comforter, a serious super-snuggler. He gave me so much. Did he ever talk to me about my speech?
I remember no conversations about it. Maybe I just can’t remember? Maybe the memories are too buried, too shame-bound?
My dad was trying in a 1950’s kind of way, to protect me. If you ignore something, it doesn’t really exist.
Right?
The worst of course was school. My memories of elementary school? Those years come up blank, just empty shadowy spaces cluttered with the vagueness of memory.
In high school? Ouch. High school. I will spare us too specific of memories—but:
I died a thousand deaths in Spanish One class with Mr. Mano, 4th period, junior year, going up and down the rows saying the vocabulary words. I wrote daily passes to the bathroom, strategically timing my absence for when my row would be reciting.
Didn’t he wonder why I always went to the bathroom at the same time?
I died a thousand deaths in the Problems of Democracy (greatly ironic and relevant title), senior year, period 8 with Mr. Shorten. We sat alphabetically and had to call out our test scores for him to put in his book. It was never my grade that embarrassed me, it was trying to say it aloud.
89%.
91%
87%
I died a thousand deaths daily throughout my schooling. How did I ever manage, how I ever maintain the hypervigilance, the exhausting and constant scanning of the environment for what words might be required of me? I had to predict what might be coming toward me, decide if I could say it, and substitute with safe words.
I died a thousand deaths, daily and always—not at Girl Scout Camp, not always at home. But everywhere else. Damn. It makes total sense that, once I got to college, I drank and drugged.
Yet, here’s the good news—it was in the dying, the daily, the constant, that my superpower was born:
The power of synonymizing. I knew what sounds I could and could not say. I would create other ways, find other words, to express something.
When I had to say a specific word, I was screwed. Literally.
When I could make stuff up, talk around it, I was freer. Not totally free. But released from some pressure.
I became masterful at synonymizing.
Out of the trauma, the endless tearing open of my soul, a doorway was created, big enough, wide enough, deep enough, to hold all the words that my Higher Power would be giving me.
My superpower is my voice—teaching, leading meditations and writing. My access to speaking and saying the truth of the moment is truly God-sent, I believe, forged on the anvils of my childhood pain.
I don’t know how.
Nor do I know why
All that pain was transmuted.
But it was
Nor do I know how my stuttering shifted.
How it was mostly lifted.
I got sober.
I had to say my name in meetings.
I had to read aloud in meetings.
I was carried through.
I was blessed.
I was healed.
I continue to be carried through.
I continue to be blessed.
I continue to be healed.
And that’s the truth of it.
~~~
I do love Beautiful Chorus is a glorious group, a “collective of voices creating High Frequency Love music, soothing soundscapes, mantras and meditations.” Here is their powerful offering,
I Am:
~~~
Dear Friends,
Love,
Light,
Perhaps even
Laughter
To you
And Yours.
L’Shana Tova—
A good New Year
To us all.
Truly,
Aruni
~~~
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