If you’re familiar with the Harry Potter series, you probably know about the Patronus charm. In order for a witch or wizard to conjure up this spell, they need to think of a powerfully positive moment in their life. As Professor Lupin puts it, “It will work only if you are concentrating, with all your might, on a single, very happy memory.”
This would always provoke in me the question: if I was trying to cast a Patronus charm, which happy memory would I focus on? What moment in my life could make me make feel such a strong, immediate gust of positive emotion?
This question always bummed me out, because it was hard for me to think of anything I’d be able to use. There’d been plenty of happy moments in my life, but none of them felt powerful enough to produce this spell. I’d remember an embarrassing moment and I’d instinctively cringe, or I’d remember a moment where I was mistreated and I could feel my blood pressure rising as I relived it. But for a long time, I couldn’t remember a happy moment that was so happy the feeling became physical.
I finally got my Patronus memory in December of 2020, when I was in the middle of overcoming the speech impediment I’d struggled with for 22 years. I’d never been able to pronounce the “r” sound and I had a partial lateral lisp, but by this point, I’d progressed to the point where the lisp was gone, and I could now pronounce the “r” sound correctly, as long as I concentrated.
I was sitting in my car, alone at 1:00 am, having spent the last few hours reading articles out loud, listening to my voice slowly but surely improve. With every line I spoke, pronouncing the “r” sound got ever so slightly easier.
At a certain point I understood it was time to give my vocal chords a break, to go inside and get ready for bed. Before I did that, however, I took out the voice recorder app on my phone and started speaking names into it. I would say my brothers’ names, my parents’ names, my friends’ and extended family’s names. All of the people in my life whose names I hadn’t previously been capable of saying correctly, I said them into the voice app with perfect pronunciation. Then I played the recording to myself, just to confirm that I had in fact said everything as well as I thought I had. Then I cried.
There are a lot of studies out there about how stress affects the body. One somewhat counter-intuitive phenomenon is the fact that although stress can lead to sickness, some people don’t actually get sick until after the stress period ends. Some can deal with an unusually exhausting work week just fine, but get hit with a migraine as soon as Friday evening comes around. For some, it’s only after they get a respite from stress and anxiety that their body allows itself to fully feel all that pain. This is what’s been happening to me these past few months: I’m only just now confronting the mental toll having a speech impediment has had on me.
Lately I’ve been actively speaking up in class, going on dates(!), ordering takeout over the phone instead of placing the order online. The ability to do all this without an excessive amount of anxiety is amazing, but it comes with a sense of loss, with the constant reminder that I’ve been denied such a basic ability for most of my life.
In a lot of ways I feel like I’ve been robbed of a proper college experience, and a proper high school experience for that matter. If speech had never been an issue I’d probably have joined the school’s theater club as a teenager, maybe even the debate club. The moments in class where the teacher would call on students to read from the text wouldn’t have been anywhere near as agonizing, and all those mandatory class presentations I had to give could’ve been so comparatively easy.
Just in the last few months, overcoming a speech impediment has given me a massive boost in confidence that I’ve taken with me into pretty much every aspect of my life. Everything is easier now. That’s great, but man, would my life have been so different if everything had gotten easier ten years ago. It’s only after realizing how good things are now that I’m fully feeling just how bad things used to be.
Since I was around eleven years old — the period where I began to hear myself the way everyone else heard me — I dealt with my speech impediment by avoiding hard words. Anything with an emphasis on “sh,” “ch,” or “r” sounds were to be avoided as much as possible. I would be saying something, all the while concentrating on the words coming up ahead. I wouldn’t just be formulating my thoughts like a normal person would; I’d also be desperately trying to rephrase my thoughts in real time so that they were as easy as possible for me to say. If there was a heavy “r” word coming up, as I spoke I would try to find a suitable, easier synonym to replace it with before I reached that word. If I couldn’t think of a replacement word in time, I would either pretend as if I was drawing a blank, or I would try to say it as best I could and hope the listener didn’t make a remark.
This led to a lot of embarrassing moments. It made me stutter a lot, and it made me look stupider than I actually was. It also had the counter-productive effect of drawing more attention to my speech impediment than if I’d just said the words straight-up. More than anything, the stress of feeling the need to do this made it so I would try to speak as little as possible. There are so many times where I had something I really wanted to say, but stayed silent.
As I got more comfortable around someone I would loosen up slightly, but not much. Even when I was talking to siblings or close childhood friends, I was always self-censoring to some extent. For around eleven years straight, I was never able to just say what I wanted to say. It’s only now that I can appreciate just how exhausting that was, to exist in such a constant state of high-alert.
I can also appreciate just how hopeless my situation had used to feel to me. There had been plenty of times over the years where I’d make another attempt to fix my speech, but deep down I never really believed I’d be able to do it. I would attempt to say the “r” sound in the same way you’d buy a lottery ticket: sure, you’re disappointed when you don’t win, but deep down you weren’t actually expecting to have the winning ticket.
I could get through life with a speech impediment one day at a time, but when I thought about the very likely possibility of being stuck this way my whole life, it was too much to handle. This is just how I am? Forever?
I would think about a life as a parent where I wouldn’t feel comfortable reading to my kids, because I wouldn’t want them to pick up my bad speech habits themselves. I’d think of myself at fifty years old, still spending most of my mental energy in every conversation trying to avoid hard words when I spoke, still not ordering the meal I really wanted at a restaurant because the name of the meal was too embarrassing for me to try to pronounce.
For the most part I suppressed these worries. I told myself my speech impediment was temporary, even though deep down I knew that was a lie. I knew, in my gut, that this was all permanent. It’s only after learning my gut was wrong that I can fully feel how terrible it was to truly believe this problem would never end.
In recent weeks, I’ve found myself drawn to videos where colorblind people are given those special glasses that let them see all the colors for the first time in their lives. If you ever want to see me cry, just show me one of those videos.
I know it’s not the same thing as overcoming a speech impediment, but I feel like I understand why so many of these people break down into tears when they put on those glasses. It’s not just the intense joy of being able to see the full beauty of the world; it’s also the sudden rush of understanding of just how much you’ve been missing out on before this point. It’s the push-and-pull of those emotions that provokes such an intense reaction. Overall it’s a happy moment, but it’s only so powerfully happy because of the pain that comes with it.
A moment like this will stick with a person for the rest of their lives. The kid in this video will never forget how it felt to see color for the first time, and I’ll never forget the moment where it truly hit me that I’d overcome the speech impediment I always thought would be permanent. If the kid ever needs to fend off some dementors, I know one memory he can use.
