Somewhat Silent

Your voice is nasal Your m’s and n’s aren’t nasal enough. You lisp on the S’s Your Z’s aren’t long enough. Your tongue sticks out when you say L’s. You’re talking from up here again instead of down here Say it again. Say it again. Say it the way I’m saying it now–see this little infestimal movement that I’m making inside of my mouth? You need to make that movement when you say that letter. What movement are you making inside your mouth when you make that sound? It’s all wrong.

Over and over again. Over the years. I’d master one sound, and then it would be rolled into a word, and then we’d find words that I couldn’t make the sound roll into the adjacent sound properly, and I’d repeat them over and over and over again. Into a microphone, into a bag, into a balloon, into a bullhorn, poking my cheeks, feeling my throat, pressing in on my stomach.

Your voice is nasal. Your voice is nasal. Your voice is nasal. Your voice is nasal. nasal nasal nasal. No one can understand you.

So I’d speak less nasally, then I’d be too un-nasal. Then I’d up the nasality, and I’d be too nasal, and I could only seem to find that sweet-spot of perfect nose-mouth-chest synchronosity one out of ten attempts.

I started whispering and talking faster and faster, less comprehesible. Less intelligible. Less time talking, less time thinking, less time breathing inbetween words. Get ‘em all out, all out, and who care if someone understands them anyway? No one can understand me anyway. Why should I waste the time to speak “clearly”? What a f*ing joke.

I hated speech therapy because it was goal oriented on a goal that I could not meet. And as such, it was a goal that I didn’t want to meet I can work on improvement, but it was never portrayed to me in that way. I was mainstreamed, so my speech classes were mainstreamed speech classes–classes for the kids that had a lisp or a stutter, or a slight adhesion of the tongue to the inside of the mouth. Things that would be corrected, and release them into the successful status of “graduated”.

And every year I was left behind, not realizing that I wasn’t considered a great failure of the system, but one of the biggest successes. Just one that would never fully graduate. Ever.