Евгений Мешков - Simple Truths of Life

One day our company was drinking. As far as I remember, I did not touch any alcohol then. At that time, many guys were crowding around one of my old female friends. They were hugging with her and so on. I do not remember if I was a bit drunk after all, or I just wanted to get a little closer to her, but to my flirtations she told me the following: “Listen, you moron, stop touching me!” It hurt me, and for a long time I remembered that incident, wondering why she said it to me and in such a harsh form? After all, I did not want to do anything bad to her and I was her old friend. She did not treat new strangers like that. Moreover, it was she who had previously told me that I was a “very handsome boy”. So what had changed since then?

There were other cases when some long-time friends said something negative about me to others and looked somewhat weirdly in my direction. I could only guess about the reasons for their actions, since none of my old friends told me anything at all. In addition, I did not ask them for an answer.

In the fall, when I returned to Moscow, I received call-up papers to the recruitment office. While I was driving there, I saw a very pretty girl in the tram. She was different from other people in that she cheerfully looked at the sunny street from the window of the tram. She got out of the car, and for a while I was following her with my gaze. I recalled her from time to time. In the process of writing this book, I understand that perhaps her cheerfulness was the reason for my craving for her. We already had something in common.

At the military registration and enlistment office, one of the doctors asked me questions about my health and whether I had any complaints. I answered him, to which he unexpectedly told me to behave with dignity. I did not understand what caused his statement, since from my point of view I behaved just like that, despite the nervousness from being in the military enlistment office.

I really had health complaints then. Even though I had the Internet, I continued to watch erotic films on TV when I was alone at home. I often began to stretch the act of masturbation, in anticipation of seeing the actress I liked in action. And so, when on one such night I brought myself to orgasm, my heart started to pound for the first time. This was not normal, and I was uncomfortable. Then I continued to masturbate every day, because I could not get rid of this bad habit, having a very strong sex drive every day. Every time after an orgasm, I was not feeling well. I began to feel my heart and no longer felt light and calm in my chest. But these alarming symptoms time after time disappeared in the morning, and I felt good.

I talked about my heart complaints to another doctor as well when I took the treadmill test. I do not think she was listening to me, since I was not sent anywhere else regarding that.

Then they sent me to the doctor who spoke to me about my stuttering. She sent me for an examination to another medical center, but I remember the following bit. When she went out to speak with her colleague in the corridor, I remember exactly how that man, at the mention of me, spoke of me as of a “little boy”. He said this in the tone that they say about effeminate or gay men. I know for sure that it was about me, because then he looked at me and said something of an apology about the fact that it is clear that it is hard to live like this for the whole life. It really hurt me a lot, and I could not understand where such an attitude towards me comes from…

It was a cloudy rainy day when I was going for a medical examination of my speech. I think that I was then relaxed, because I decided that in any case I would not go to the army. I have always treasured freedom…

Having arrived to the building, I went into the doctor’s office and something terrible happened. I just could no stutter!

After finishing my “examination”, the woman gave me a closed envelope which had to be handed over to the doctors at the military registration and enlistment office. Then I went out of her office into the corridor to my mother and father with tears in my eyes.

The so-called “stuttering” ruined my whole life. I had neither love, nor friends, and at one time I could not even utter a single word, and now, when such an important moment came up in my life, I could speak almost better than any anchor on television…

When the envelope was opened at the military registration and enlistment office, it became clear that my pathetic attempts to show the woman on medical examination that I had really stuttered were unsuccessful. Fortunately for me, a woman in the military enlistment office could still use her brains, although she did not very flatteringly introduce me to her colleague the other day. The additional checks she sent me to give me a military ID and relieved me of my military duty due to stuttering. I was told that in three years they could invite me for new speech checks.

Despite the fact that I did not need to join the army, the moment with the inability to stammer in the speech influenced me very much. I could no longer live with such mockery in this life. I simply no longer had anything that I could live for, and that night I firmly decided that that day would be the last for me. This was the second time that I really wanted to commit suicide, but for some reason I did not go to the ninth floor of my house right away… instead, I decided to sleep and say goodbye to everything the next morning…

When I woke up, I had a very clear idea in my head to go to the computer and search in Yandex “how to get rid of stuttering”. I did that. The first website was that of Roman Alekseevich Snezhko. It was clearly written on that webpage that stuttering is not a disease, but just a habit. At that moment I knew that it was the truth!

In my mind, I immediately went back to my distant school days, when the teacher would ask me to read the book aloud several times in literature classes, and each time I would initially begin to stammer a lot, but then I focused on what was happening here and now, and speech became ideal right away, and I also felt in those moments like an ordinary and healthy person.

Then it was the end of 2006, and Roman Alekseevich published absolutely for free of charge the information on his website about what stuttering really is and how to get rid of it. [2]

The reason for stuttering is very simple – it is a stupor that occurs when a person, out of habit and without realizing it, tries to do several things at the same time. A person can only do one thing with one part of the body, or organ, per unit of time. For example, you cannot turn your head left and right at the same time. The same applies to our brain, and to the speech apparatus. From my own experience I can say that during stuttering a person does not think one hundred percent about what he is trying to say. For example, he may have thoughts about what others think about him, or recall something from the past, or maybe he does not have a clearly constructed thought at all, but at the same time he is still trying to say something. People who speak perfectly and easily form a clear thought in their head, and then, holding that thought in their minds, they pronounce it sequentially. If for some reason they lost their thought, for example, if they started thinking about something else, then people stop talking and start making sounds only when they again form a clear thought about what they want to say. Otherwise, they will just have a stupor. Stuttering people just need to develop the habit of being here and now during a conversation and speak only when there is a clearly formulated thought in their head.

That is why I would always start to speak perfectly, when I threw away all outside thoughts and anxieties from my head, and just started to live in the present.