Ten Years of Speech Therapy for Sounds I Couldn’t Hear

My S and R sounds were wrong. That’s what they told me, for nearly a decade.

Speech therapy started in first grade and didn’t end until tenth, so I spent almost ten years being told the way I spoke wasn’t right. The problem was that it sounded fine to me.

That’s the part that’s hard to explain to someone who hears normally. When your hearing is your only reference point, everything sounds correct because you have nothing to compare it to. My S was my S and my R was my R, and when the therapist said they were off, I just had to take her word for it, because I couldn’t hear the difference she was hearing. So for years I practiced sounds I couldn’t fully perceive, trying to hit a target I couldn’t hear well enough to aim at.

I don’t think it was ever really resolved. At some point they just kind of stopped. The therapy didn’t end with a breakthrough, it ended with a quiet giving up, and it was theirs, not mine.

But here’s the thing that’s stuck with me. In my entire life I have never had a problem being understood, not in school, not in my career, not with friends or strangers. I know I slur words sometimes, and I catch it and correct it when I can, but nobody has ever struggled to understand what I’m saying.

I’m not saying speech therapy is useless. It helps a lot of people. For me, though, the gap between what they were trying to fix and what real life actually required was wider than anyone ever admitted.