My Speech Therapist Said People Would Assume I Was Stupid

My speech therapist told me people would assume I was stupid if I didn’t fix the way I talked, and I was a kid, so I believed her.

I went to speech therapy from first grade through about tenth grade because I wasn’t pronouncing my S and R sounds correctly, which makes sense, because if you can’t clearly hear a sound you can’t reproduce it. The sounds I was making sounded fine to me, since my hearing was the only baseline I had. Somewhere in all of that, she told me that mispronouncing words would make people think I was uneducated, and she said it like it was supposed to motivate me. Fix the sounds or get judged for the rest of your life.

What it actually did was plant a fear in an eight-year-old’s head that I carried for years longer than I should have, second-guessing how I sounded and wondering what people were thinking when I introduced myself.

Here’s what actually happened in real life. Nothing. In over twenty years of working in technology, leading teams, interviewing, and presenting to executives, not one person has ever told me my speech made them question my intelligence. Not in school, not at work, not anywhere.

My take on it now is pretty simple. If someone heard me talk and decided I was stupid, they’re just people I don’t want anything to do with, and I’m not going to twist myself into knots trying to win them over. Scaring a kid into compliance was never motivation. It was just damage, and it took me a long time to tell her fear apart from my actual life.