Sp-Speak

Image credit: Alexander Ivanov

In the corner of my brother’s room there was a little cubby hole. In this concrete box we’d managed to squeeze in a wardrobe for my brother’s clothes, along with photo albums, board games, old teddy bears and sometimes my mother. She’d stow herself away under the cover of night-time shadows trailing a limp blanket behind her. If my brother was awake, she’d put a finger to her lips and murmur something like, “just to get some peace,” and she’d disappear inside.

When da would come home drunk and angry he’d ask us where she was. We’d shrug and say that maybe she was at granny’s house again. Sometimes he bought it and would crash around the house until he tired himself out and went to bed. Other times he’d barge upstairs and rip her from her little claustrophobic sanctuary.

We were regular witnesses to the abuse my mother suffered, whether it was physical or emotional. Whether it was her head bashed against the door or being called a whore. After one of these incidents she’d tell us, “now don’t be telling anyone about this, okay?”

We swore she’d be provided with our mutual silence. It was ironic because when she did get the courage to speak out, she’d be confronted with stony policemen telling her;

“Now Mrs Campion you must have done something.”

“Could he not just stay the night? Sure look — he’s calm now.”  

We didn’t have to keep silent, nobody was listening anyway.

My body reacted a little too literally to my mother’s pleas for silence. As I started developing an anxiety disorder which would unleash panic attacks so grave they’d end with me vomiting, I began to lose my actual voice. Words became stuck in my mouth. My tongue would cramp up and refuse to give way to whatever word that I was struggling with. Consonant clusters would either repeat endlessly on a loop or long, open vowels refused to make an appearance when I wanted them to. I had developed a stammer.

It was an endless cycle: anxiety-induced stammering followed by more anxiety for fear of speaking. Eventually I became too embarrassed, ashamed and defeated to speak. If the phone rang at home I’d ask my brother to get it, I stopped volunteering to read in class even though I usually knew all of the difficult words and I avoided people because I couldn’t bear their look of desperate pity as I tried to articulate myself. I’m naturally quite an extroverted person and not being able to speak was an agony. I began to believe that I was an idiot who had nothing important to say. My self-confidence became so low and my frustration so high that I began self-harming as a means of releasing tension from my exhausting self-loathing.

I hear mental health organizations, councillors, doctors and loved ones telling us that we should speak about our problems, speak out about what is happening to us.

Speak.

What if the problem you have is with speaking itself? Well, that’s where writing came into my life.

I started to keep diaries from around the time my stammer appeared and wrote stories and poems to myself, gingerly testing out my voice on paper. I began to regain a sense of self-control and self-expression that was denied to me orally.

Stammerers are actually quite well-equipped to be writers. When you stop speaking, you listen. We listen to everything around us, we don’t just hear it passively; we dissect and interrogate it. That gives us a good ear for dialogue.  We become walking thesauruses because we know which words or sounds we stammer on, so we are always on the look-out for synonyms to replace difficult words. This means that we have a great vocabulary. As we shy away from contact with others (not necessarily meaning we are introverted as in my case) we become prone to deep introspection. Just because we keep our mouths shut doesn’t mean we aren’t swimming in ideas, thoughts and words. This gives us insight.

As a child and teenager I felt as though I’d been robbed of my right to a voice, both by my own mouth and by the abuse at home. However, my stammer has turned out to be a strange blessing; without it I don’t think I would have found writing which is where I really found my voice.

Kerry Campion de Santiago is an Irish writer from Belfast who immigrated to Spain in 2015. She works as an English teacher and writes whenever she can. She has been published in The F Word and A New Ulster and is currently editing her first novel.