Kenyon Martin Quotes

Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I'd try to read my lessons, and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter.

Yes, and I had pimples so badly it used to make me so shy. I used not to look at myself. I'd hide my face in the dark, I wouldn't want to look in the mirror and my father teased me and I just hated it and I cried everyday.

I was a closet stutterer.

Part of what was in the ether all around me growing up, until I was between 19 and 20, was a terrible, debilitating stutter. It was part of what made me very reclusive as a kid.

I have such bad memories, sitting in the back of a classroom, being told, you know, everybody is going to read a paragraph, and skipping ahead to my paragraph and being mortified and trying to read it enough times so that I wouldn't stutter and stammer, getting called on, even in high school.

I did get bullied and I did get picked on and I did have that feeling in my gut of being incredibly self-conscious. I naturally gravitated towards my elders because I didn't know how to speak or be present with my peers.

I used to stutter really badly. Everybody thinks it's funny. And it's not funny. It's not.

I didn't have many friends; I was kind of bullied at school.

I couldn't walk down any street in Britain without being laughed at. It was a nightmare. My children were devastated because their dad was a figure of ridicule.

I've stammered all my life, and it's fair to say that my stammer has shaped my life. It's made me make some decisions that I'm sure I wouldn't have if I didn't suffer with this affliction.

There were periods during my childhood when I stammered so badly I couldn't talk at all.

I had a bad stutter when I was really young. I couldn't get a sentence out. Like, 'D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-ad.' And that turned into a mumble.

I have been a lifelong stutterer, and when I was young, I experienced some very difficult times.

I had a lil' chub-chub moment from ages 7 to 11. If somebody was teasing, they'd go straight to my fat. I was so insecure, I kept my shirt on in the pool, which is the worst because it sticks to your stomach anyway.

I felt alienated at school, and I never did well with girls.

In junior high school, I was an object of pure ridicule for my dress, withdrawal, and asocial manner. Dozens of times, I saw individuals laugh and smile more in ten to fifteen minutes than I did in all my life up to then.

Don't forget, I was the soft, pudgy kid in school that everyone made fun of.

When I was growing up, I wasn't an extrovert. If anything, I was an introverted kid and a very average pupil at school. I was very quiet.

After that I couldn't show my face outside. I lost my identity and balance. I was still living with my parents, and they were my only friends. For so many people, this thing with the nurse was confirmation that I must be mad or mentally ill.

The last thing in the world I should have done was go into the theater because was inordinately shy as a young man. I couldn't open my mouth. At a party, I was the one stuck up against the wall. I was embarrassed about talking. I felt that I couldn't talk well.

Even at age 10, I already knew that I was different from most people. My anxiety disorder was still years from being diagnosed, but it affected me quite deeply. I was too afraid to speak out in class, too nervous to make real friends.

I got picked on a lot, even by teachers too. I liked to listen to musicals and bake, and my homeroom teacher found out and mocked me in front of the whole class for baking.

Well, no, you can prepare it all you want, but I'd still stutter.

For some reason, I was born without a sense of embarrassment or shame.

I was the fat kid, so as a defense mechanism, I was the jokester.