If 18-year-old Mallory Anderson could flip a switch and turn off her stuttering, she wouldn’t do it.
It’s part of who she is. Like the color of her eyes, or the tone of her voice.
Still, if there were a pause button for stuttering, Anderson said, she’d use that in a heartbeat.
“If there were a situational switch, I would turn it off for job interviews and sometimes in class,” said Anderson, who is a freshman in the honors college at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Occasionally, she said, she has the impulse to ask a question in a large class, “But I can’t because sometimes nothing comes out. There have been times I say to myself, ‘I’m not going to ask a question in front of all of these people.'”