Blog: If anyone can change the world

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Social Media Manager Neha reflects on attending her very first STAMMAFest. 

Last Thursday, I arrived for my very first STAMMAFest, camera and mic in tow, thinking it would be a brilliant weekend where I'd be chatting to everyone and taking fun photos for our socials and as a person who stammers, I knew I'd learn a lot. I knew just how hard everyone had worked to pull this together, all the long hours and blue-light laptop filters and WhatsApp groups, and knew it would be fantastic and very much worth it. I didn't think that I'd spend the whole weekend understanding how the world could be changed. 

After the AGM on Saturday, Vee, our Campaigns Manager, ran an interactive session complete with a mock-toilet, about companies that let people who stammer down (more on this in the coming weeks!), and during the Q&A there had been hand after hand going up from people who stammer advocating for themselves, pointing out industries and sharing their experiences. 

Many say that people who stammer have a way with words. And this is true. But here's something else I'm realising this weekend. We have people from all over the world here at this conference, we're all so very different and it's not even that we all stammer: some attendees are allies, family or speech & language therapists. But this wave of gentle, unpatronising encouragement when you block on a word seems to be this innate quality the hundreds of attendees here all unequivocally share: when they listen, they mean it. 

I have been to countless rallies yet I am simply astounded that this one is taking place and that I am here to see it happen for the first time.

Sometimes even the little obstacles seem steep, and even the gentlest slopes feel like mountains. Ordering something at a café and having your name chewed up and mocked before being handed back to you might seem like a very little thing, yet it's monumental when it happens time after time. In those circumstances, carving out a space to stammer feels like cutting diamonds with your fingernails, and changing the world feels impossible.

And then I see volunteer John Russell whirling about on the dancefloor hand in hand with Vee, and I can't move the camera fast enough to keep up with them. And there's the Youth Exchange contingent from all over Europe and the UK, going crazy for the cover band, and covering each other in glitter. There's organisers Dean and Paul running a quiz outstanding enough to warrant a multi-year BBC deal. There's a teenage boy telling me that Bob Adams, one of the Family Day workshop facilitators, is the coolest guy in the world, and how he "wants a big silver earring just like his" and his mother looks simultaneously immensely proud of her son and slightly alarmed at the prospect of a big silver earring just like Bob's.

I'm outside Daniele Rossi's workshop and the Canadian illustrator behind Franky Banky has just asked them to draw their stammer as an animal. I can hear an entire menagerie of stammering animals coming alive on paper and I have never seen kids look as excited as those ones did coming out of the room, showing each other their drawings. There's Yoshi on his first trip to the UK, sharing out Japanese snacks, and there's Nic from the UK telling me how much her child loves Franky Banky and the weekend just feels like an unbroken circle stretching around the world.

And there's Conor and Patrick organising the first stammering pride rally, turquoise and blue wave flags as far as you look (see the picture above). There's poetry and posters and cheering and I am sitting on the floor with my camera because I have been to countless rallies yet I am simply astounded that this one is taking place and that I am here to see it happen for the first time.

And this is what I realise, four days on: if anyone can change the world, it's them.

It is the first time all weekend that I am utterly lost for words. 

When you stammer, the world can be a hostile and unpredictable place — and you end up learning at a very young age that the only way through is to build your own shelter from that landslide. To carve out your own little comforts when the world does not provide them. I sit at that rally and realise how in the end, all those days of shame and loneliness and dashed hopes ended up leading us here, to one another. To where we are now, and the shelter we find in each other.

And the very best thing, the thing I'll think about all my life, I've saved for last. 

Because on Saturday, there's this eight-year-old girl with glitter in her hair and stars in her eyes. I show her my bucket of funny stickers and freebies and she reaches for one that says 'Yes, I stammer, why don't you?'. I put another one in her hand and it says 'The coolest kids stammer', and she tells me that this is the first time she's met other kids who talk like her. 

She says she wishes she could 'do' jokes too and I ask her what letter she struggles with the most and she says 'D'. So I teach her how to work her stammer into a long, convoluted sing-song tale about "dinner and dancing with my dear old dad and my dear dim dachshund named Dim Dim Dog", how her stammer is what makes the joke come alive in a way a fluent speaker could never do. Her father comes over and laughs at the joke, and then picks a sticker up that says ‘Someone I love stammers and they'll change the world’, looks at it for a very long time and puts it in his pocket.

Later, he sends me a message, saying that watching me run around the hall 'bouncing about' and talking and joking with everyone, seeing his normally-quiet daughter go on and on about the 'grown up girl who stammers', hearing her drive them crazy in the car for hours practicing the silly stammer-y joke story so she could tell it at school, all of that gives him the courage to hope that one day she too will be as at ease with herself as I seemed to be. It is the first time all weekend that I am utterly lost for words. 

He asks if I could send him a few more of those change the world stickers for the rest of the family, and says he believes his daughter will change the world. I think about how it feels to know a normally-quiet girl sat in a car excitedly working her stammer into my jokes for hours on end, and tell him she already has.

How was STAMMAFest for you? If you attended and would like to share your experiences, see Submit Something For The Site or email editor@stamma.org 

Feeling a post-conference comedown? Want ideas to keep up the momentum? Read our blog 'Keeping the STAMMAFest spark alive'.