In great company

Hello everyone!

The first 2 weeks of january have almost passed and the first snow has fallen in Belgium.
I never would have thought that we would see snow this year but here we go.

Time for another post on my blog.
I wanted to write last week but seeing as I was sick with a very bad cold I decided to wait until I got better.

For this post I wanted to emphasize the fact that stutterers are not alone. We look up to celebrity's and people who have made a name for themselves. Atleast I do. And sometimes it feels like they have everything going for them. When you discover that they are just normal people like us, it feels like a new world opens up.
We are not the only ones struggling with stuttering. There are a lot of celebrity's who went through the same thing as a lot us did.


James Earl Jones

We all know James Earl Jones. He is the voice of darth vader and Mufasa in the lion king. He is a brilliant actor with a voice that everybody knows so well.
James was also a stutterer. But he wasn't born with it like many of us.
It was actually by imitating his cousin Randy, who did have a stutter, that he started stuttering himself.
Because of this there was a time when he didn't speak to anyone. He chose to stay silent.
With the help of a teacher he slowly overcame it and started to study drama at university, by this time he had a grip on his stutter.
Years have gone by and in all of them he only stuttered once on stage.

I think this shows that if you really want to, you can make your weakness your greatest strenght.



Marylin Monroe

When you mention Marylin Monroe to me, I always think about her voice. She had this very breathy voice that sounded really sexy.
What a lot of people don't know is that this voice was a result of her stuttering as a child.

Marylin stuttered very heavily during her childhood, a speech therapist taught her how to use her breathing to help her speech. And that is where her famous voice comes from.

To this day, Marylin Monroe is still considered to be one of the most sexy woman in this world. Sometimes having a stutter can make you feel like an outcast. But this woman didn't let it bother her at all. Just for that she is someone to look up to.


Samuel L. Jackson

Another great man and another great actor.
Samuel L Jackson has been a stutterer since his childhood.
Until this day he still struggles with it, but he has found a great help ...

"I was the other day on the set of Captain America, and they said 'Action!" and I said, 'G-g-g-et ...' It was a G day. So I have my days. I have G days, I have P days, I have B days, I have S days, and I'm still stuttering. But I figured out a way to do it. And some days, the best thing for me to do is say my favorite word, and I get through it: 'Motherfucker!'"

Appearantly, saying the word 'Motherfucker' helps him talk trough his stutters.
Why? because the word itself has a lot of anger in it. It relieves a lot of that build up anger or stress that so many stutterers deal with. By saying that word the situation itself can become more amusing.

Maybe not the best help for someone that works in the insurance sector but I think that it really suits Samuel L Jackson haha.


Emily Blunt

We all know her as the snotty assistant from the devil wears prada but in real life she is also a stutterer. By looking at her acting skills you would never have guessed that she was also a really heavy stutterer.

While growing up, she had a stutter so bad that she couldn't even hold a conversation.
Like most of us, she had a lot to say but just couldn't get it out.

With the help of a speech therapist and a school play where she could distance her from herself, she started to see that she could speak fluently.



I can go on and on with my list. Let's not forget Julia Roberts, Rowan Atkinson, King george, Winston Churchill, Chris Martin, Elvis Presley, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

What I'm trying to show with this is that all of these people had a stutter. Maybe not all of their lives but they did struggle with it for a long time. They have all become succesfull. They have become oscar winners, golden globe winners, scientists, the most famous people of this world are on this list.

So why be ashamed? Why be ashamed of something that happends to the best of us? Why just say 'being a stutterer is all I am' when it's clear that we can become so much more?

Stuttering isn't in our lives to make us less than anyone else. It's there to make us better! To challenge ourselves every day and to do things that we were once afraid of.
Don't let this or the reactions of others tear you down. All of these people never did that.
They kept on going and worked hard to achieve their goals and dreams.

We can become anything we want to be. It might take a lot of hard work but let's face it. Nobody has died from working hard in their lives.

I hope this post can make you realise that this stuttering can lift you up and build you up to be an amazing person. You are more than a stutterer. You are fighter and a survivor.
But most of all, you are who you are and you can become whatever you want to be.
Never ever forget that.



Much love,
Natasja