Jacquelyn Revere wanted to be an actress at a very young age. She got “the bug” as a child while watching television, and the desire never left her.
“I was watching ‘Sesame Street’ when I was 5 and something said ‘That!’ and I pointed and said ‘Mom that’s what I want to do,’ ” she recalls. “She was like e ‘Yeah, sure,’ and nothing happened but there was this feeling of want. And I feel I wanted to act at 5. Then I’d see stage plays and I saw ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and it excited me so much. There was literally this pain of wanting to be up there. The pain is still there. That’s how I knew.”
But Revere’s dream was met with a very real roadblock; she’s a stutterer. Her speech impediment led to her being given strictly non-speaking roles in school plays as a teen.
“I was president of the Drama Club from sixth grade to eighth and they would not give me speaking parts at all,” she recalls.
Revere stopped acting in high school and majored in political science intially in college, before she switched to theater her junior year. “I ended up graduating [without] speaking onstage,” she says. “I technically did not speak on stage until I started grad school.
“I started a blog called ‘Confessions of a Stutterer’ when I was 22. I took this very intensive [program] where they put you in a small room with a computer that retaught you how to speak and I wanted to be fluent. On the last day, we were supposed to be talking about these techniques out in public and I couldn’t get words out and it just broke my heart. Knowing that I needed to communicate this in some way and not keep it all inside, I started this blog.”
She decided to be open and confident about her stutter. But Revere and her family continued to seek a solution, spending thousands in the process.
“After spending thousands of dollars trying to fix the stutter — there are so many ‘devices’ that are out there claiming that they’ll cure stuttering — we tried all of them,” she says. I actually calculated this; my parents and myself spent around $30,000 figuring out a cure for stuttering.”
From her own experiences, she warns against falling for every offer that claims it can fix a stutter.
“There were tons of scams out there,” Revere explains. “This one woman charges $7,000 for a session over Skype and she claims that she’ll cure your stutter, but you can never talk to a person that stutters again or you’ll ‘re-catch’ the stutter. You can’t ‘catch’ a stutter — it’s neurological.”
Revere’s work has gotten attention. She’s going to Paris this fall to meet up with some stutterers and has been invited to the Indian Stuttering Association’s conference in Mumbai this October. She’s passionate about raising awareness and helping anyone who struggles with a speech impediment to be themselves.
“There are people who I call ‘covert stutterers,’ people who can hide their stutter,” Revere explains. “They’ll switch the word they were using and say something else or they will not order the food that they want in a restaurant because they’re afraid they’ll stutter so they’ll switch. This one girl in particular re-posted my video on her Facebook page and said ‘I know I don’t talk about this a lot but I have a stutter and this explains a lot of what stuttering is.’ So helping her be completely honest about her speech, and get that out so that she can be herself; that really means a lot. More than anything, I want people to not be ashamed of who they are and things that they deal with. Because it can beat you up inside.”
