Feelings of Dissonance

I experience a strong aversion to some of the medical words used to describe my state or my situation. These words are so clinically cold. For example, the word ‘aphasic’ gives me a strongly dissonant feeling. It makes me feel nauseous. I refused, and still am refusing, to take on that label. I am Corinne Othenin-Girard, and my identity rests with myself and is not classifiable through clinical words pertaining to the stroke. In the beginning one doctor said to me that I would never be able to speak again, that, at most, I would communicate with an electronic device, typing the words in and having a robot voice speak them out. ‘Aphasic’ was the terminology that he used. ‘A’ means ‘no’, and ‘phasic’, from ‘phanai’ (Greek), means ‘to speak’. Even as I write this, I get such a strong feeling of indignation. The aversion I experience to this word, ‘aphasic’, is extreme. I make myself taller, draw my shoulders back, clench my jaw and strengthen my body like a bullfighter.

For this multimodal account, I wanted to make a drawing with Aphasia in the foreground of my mind, but I had to do something else before beginning the drawing. That something was this metaphorical poem. Memnosyne is the personification of memory in Greek mythology. She is also the mother of the nine muses: Erato – love poetry, Melpomene – tragedy, Polhymnia – hymns, Calliope – epic poetry, Euterpe – music, Thalia – comedy, Clio – history, Urania – astronomy, Terpsichore – dance. Lethe is the river in Hades from which dead souls drank to prevent themselves from remembering their past lives when reincarnated. Initiates were encouraged to drink from the river Mnemosyne, which gives back memory.

How does this fit my experiences? I was, and possibly still am, traumatised by what happened to me. Out of the blue, one moment – perfectly healthy, the next moment – stroke. I couldn't speak, sing or whistle and my whole right side was paralysed.

As I was going to pick up my son up from school, I saw these windows propped against a tree (Figure 1). I thought this image was an apt metaphor for how I’m dealing with my changed situation, and so I recorded it. I can talk intellectually about what happened to my speaking abilities. The continuing emotional impact is so great, however, that I can consider it only obliquely and intermittently. I haven't faced the ‘Abgrund’ (German) – ‘abyss’. I sat face-to-face with the abyss when it happened to me. But I was shocked, traumatised really. In order to contemplate the abyss, I must remove, one by one, the windows protecting me from the elements of the Abgrund. At this moment, by describing this, I seem to be letting go one of the windows. And copious tears flow over my face. I stop writing and hold my forehead with my hand and cry.

FIGURE 1

Metaphor: The windows over the tree trunk (obscuring the ‘abyss’).

The metaphorical poem is another of the windows that I shift. In this poem I wanted to convey that I had lost my spontaneous and impromptu ability to speak, to write and also to sing, though I will, for this article, concentrate on speech and writing. But I still had other windows there. It is rather an intellectual poem, coming from the head. I couldn't describe the sense I felt in myself because, in the making of the poem, I didn't open up to my grief. That's where the Abgrund – the abyss – lies. On reflection, I can see that I am mentally positioning myself under the label ‘post-traumatic phase’, eventually intellectualising again. Why is the metaphor of the windows so striking for me? Is it because if you pass or break through, you will fall into the abyss? A window can break easily. I don't want that. I’m being strong. As I’m writing this, I’m weeping again.

Use of Metaphor for the Enquiry

I have used metaphors throughout this enquiry. The use of metaphors, as in the poem and other situations (Lakoff & Johnson, Reference Lakoff and Johnson1999), gives me some protection when the pain of the experience is too great even to articulate, let alone to re-experience through concentrating on it. Take the metaphor of ‘the windows over the tree trunk’: metaphors are, like those windows, slightly opaque. These windows direct me to the crux of the matter. In that sense they are not masks that you put on your face to hide what's going on underneath. I don't want to hide myself, but I want to uncover things in myself without being overwhelmed by the pain that still sits there. I continue on to pick up my son from school, and I feel that the reflections I’m experiencing while I’m walking help my evolving response to this enquiry. I have noticed that moving, whether it is walking, being driven in a car, tram, train or bus, or being in an airplane, helps me formulate ideas for art or, as now, for reflective writing. At this moment, this article is in the foreground of my mind. I do quite a bit of walking daily. It helps me move the subject along, to better explore different avenues and alleys in my mind about my experiences.

MIECAT's ethics application asked of me, ‘What will you do to protect yourself during the inquiry?’ I use metaphors, or, more specifically, I use metaphors, the layers of which I lift carefully one by one, always mindful that I don't become overwhelmed by what could appear or what's hiding in the abyss.

Aphasia and My Reaction to Her

In my mind I had personified Aphasia, and I addressed my poem to her. McNiff (Reference McNiff2004) encourages the reader to treat images as person and dialogue with them. In my mind I had a shadowy outline of Aphasia. I didn't yet have the actual picture, but I talked to her, although I didn't want her to talk back to me. This is imaginative variation, that is, varying the frames of reference and perspective (Moustakas, Reference Moustakas1994), which MIECAT encourages. It is a powerful tool: by making a sculpture or a drawing and then beginning a discussion or dialogue with that something or somebody, one sheds light from other angles in the enquiry. But I couldn't bear her talking to back to me. I am still disgusted with her taking abode in my house. I gave my indignation free rein in my mind. I then started to draw. I drew her side on, with no eye contact possible (Figure 2). Simultaneously I visualised what I would do to her and how I would cut her into little wedges when the drawing was finished: ‘Cut her up and reassemble it!’ This I delightfully accomplished (Figure 3).

FIGURE 2

Depiction of Aphasia.

FIGURE 3

Depiction of Aphasia: New formation.

These are my inner responses, in key words and sentences, to ‘Depiction of Aphasia’ (Figure 2):

In the following picture (Figure 3), I have cut a photocopy of the previous picture (Figure 2) into wedges and attached them in a new formation. So I now have the two pictures next to each other: the drawing and the cut-up drawing. I will leave this fact simply standing, without analysing it.

These are my inner responses to ‘Depiction of Aphasia: New formation’ (Figure 3):

I included the word ‘Aphasia’ in the title only as my last action, after writing the article for MIECAT. My speech therapist, who became a good friend, suggested that I could enlarge my initial title, ‘A personal narrative: Living with experience of suspected foreign accent syndromé, by including ‘verbal dyspraxia’ and ‘aphasia’, so it would appeal to more people. My first response to her was that I detest the word ‘aphasia’. With ‘verbal dyspraxia’ I was fine, but no way would I put ‘aphasia’ in my title. I have to unclench my jaws as I am writing this. Now you know that I put her, Aphasia, in the title, but only at the very end of writing the article.

Humour in Recovery

The third verse of my poem speaks of other muses (Thalia – comedy, Terpischore – dance, Clio – history, Urania – astronomy) and how they have been able to lift away the dark shadows. One year after my stroke, I enrolled at university in two subjects, History of Astronomy (hence Urania) and History (hence Clio) and Philosophy of Science.

I thought that I needed some broader language exercise. I was fairly confident with speaking to my neighbours or at the shop. Going to university meant not only lectures but also tutorials where I had to contribute. From Plato, Kessler and Galileo, to Kuhn (Reference Kuhn1957) and his ‘paradigm shift’, we were asked to participate in discussion. And I achieved a good pass. I chuckle every time I think of it: my ambition, my hardheadedness, my success in passing a difficult subject. Perhaps it is not so easy for the reader to understand that kind of humour (Thalia – comedy).

It is humour that I employed in my rehabilitation. For example, ‘ateretisma’, ‘acquired whistling disorder’ mentioned above, is a word that I made up. With so many heavy words, ‘cryptogenic’, ‘aphasia’, ‘verbal dyspraxia’, I wanted to lift my spirit through humour. To go too deep into those experiences can get too heavy. Or another example: I worked very hard in physiotherapy, such as doing an exercise 50 times instead of the ten times requested. I wanted to get better, I didn't want to listen to the doctor's gloomy prognostication. He had me sitting in a wheelchair from now on, was his clear meaning. Because of the massive stroke, that was all that I could expect, he said in the beginning. So I was lying on the physiotherapy bench, when that doctor came in to see how I was doing and bent over my right leg because he thought 10° of movement was the absolute maximum I could have mastered. But up came my leg like a thunderbolt, 75°!, stopping a fraction before the doctor's nose. He quickly put his head back. Because I chuckled, he couldn't help but laugh too.

Humour is very effective and helpful in coming to terms with a shocking situation like a stroke. Finding humour whenever possible is one of the ways to escape the gloominess of the aftermath of a stroke.

My Voice, My Identity and Foreign Accent Syndrome

My identity is very closely linked with my ability to speak several languages. I know myself as a person who has a strong affinity with speaking languages: German, Swiss-German, English, French, Italian and Spanish. My very first language was French, but after a few years our family spoke Swiss-German so I consider Swiss-German as my mother language. First I lived near Zürich and so had a Zürich dialect, and then at age 14, we moved to Basel Land and I soon acquired a Basel dialect. For us Swiss, dialect serves as an identity check. We can immediately say from which part of Switzerland the other person comes. When the other person can't speak any of the Swiss dialects, we are quick to detect their nationality just by listening to their speech. In all my other languages I had no easily detected accent, that is, a neutral accent.

After the stroke I had to learn to pronounce every letter and practise words by combining the sounds. As I was in Australia, I did speech therapy in English. My recovery from the stroke is still ongoing. From a time when I could not talk at all, I have come a long way through exercise and practice, so now I can say that I communicate well enough. In this context, I mean I have a fixed accent in all the languages I speak, not an accent I can change at will, as I could before the stroke. When I talk, for example, in Swiss-German, Swiss people will offer to speak in High German, English or French, because they detect a foreign accent in my pronunciation. Some people seem to think it's like a French accent or an English accent, but when I reply in French or English, still with this accent, they are quite puzzled.

That's why I suspect that I have foreign accent syndrome (FAS): ‘ . . . a rare motor speech disorder characterised by the emergence of a pronunciation which is perceived as foreign’ and ‘ . . . associated with various alterations in the fine execution of speech sounds which cause the impression of foreignness’ (Moreno-Torres et al., Reference Moreno-Torres, Berthier, del mar Cid, Green, Gutiérrez, García-Casares, … and Carnero-Pardo2013, p. 520). My clinical picture seems to coincide with the aetiology of FAS, which includes vascular brain injuries, and also appears similar to the speaker described by Moreno-Torres et al. (Reference Moreno-Torres, Berthier, del mar Cid, Green, Gutiérrez, García-Casares, … and Carnero-Pardo2013), in that her changed speech production was similar in both her languages and singing. FAS may be seen as an emergent stage of recovery from more severe speech disorders (Moreno-Torres et al., Reference Moreno-Torres, Berthier, del mar Cid, Green, Gutiérrez, García-Casares, … and Carnero-Pardo2013), suggesting transience. I can only hope that it is transient. This ‘transient’ feels like a never-ending stage. Moustakas (Reference Moustakas1995) speaks of the mystery of transition. I, for myself, cannot come to see the mystery of this at all. I constantly have to explain why I have an ‘accent’. I sound like a cracked record. I can do ‘the explaining bit’, and then usually I am classified as ‘disabled’. And from then on, when I dress well and go, for example, to a hairdresser, as most people do, I encounter stereotyped responses from those people: ‘Oh, YOU look WELL’, with the undertone that disabled people don't usually look smart. That attitude makes my blood boil! Anger rises up in me. But why should I expose myself to that attitude over and over again?

I can tell a white lie. For example, in Australia I can say that I come from the French-Swiss part of Europe. And in Switzerland I can say that I was in Australia for 23 years. Then I have to sit and endure the same ‘cheerful’ reply, ‘Ah, I can tell, you have lost your Swiss dialect a bit!’ followed by a chuckle. You can see by my tone, I’m not at all amused at this. This ‘transient’ phase has no silver lining, or mystery to my taste.

In my mind I am still the same as before. I’m sitting here, rubbing my hand over my forehead, eyes closed, right knee over the left, shallow breath, abdominal muscles tensed. I become incensed by preconceptions people make and act on when they communicate with me. They have a, ‘Can't speak well, therefore must be . . . ’, attitude. This assumption derives from my accent, which I have in whichever language I speak, and from an intermittent hesitancy when speaking. For example, in the first few years after my stroke, when I began to speak again with lots of word-finding pauses and pronunciation difficulties, I used to endure people shouting at me. Now they do other things that make me angry, such as feeding me words and speaking slowly and with grammatical errors. As I have said, I don't want to be in constant transition. Not this way. I know who I am. I am not what people conceive me to be. These two entities – reality and misconception, are in conflict. Sometimes I can even laugh at people's ignorance. But mostly it hurts me tremendously. I still have no single solution as to how to deal with people's preconceptions. I’m stuck in the transition phase.

The more I use a language, the more words and expressions I remember. I have trouble differentiating in my speaking the sounds, ‘s’, ‘sh’, ‘j’, ‘ch’ and ‘g’. Tiredness exacerbates this difficulty and also causes me to experience lengthy pauses searching for a word or an expression. I can see in people's faces when they have trouble understanding me. Quite often they come a bit closer and scrunch their eyebrows together. I catch myself then and try to carefully pronounce every word. Yet when I’m fired up about something, I can be astonishingly eloquent.

I also had to learn to write again. My speech therapist, as one of many exercises, asked me to write sentences with every word she put on an A4 page. To make the exercise more interesting and fun, I composed little stories with the words. I used humour to raise my spirits and found it many times.

A Fairy Story or Perhaps More: The Wolf, the Fox and My Voice

Once upon a time, there was a young woman who could speak many languages. From sunrise to sunset, she joyously made use of this facility, speaking these languages easily and without any hesitation wherever she went. She would translate when someone with a different mother tongue was in a pickle because they couldn't understand the language. She was happy to do this, to speak to different people from other countries in their language.

The wolf was always on the lookout for new things that he craved absolutely. His unquenchable thirst to speak many languages continued to grow while he listened in secret to the young woman. ‘I wish I could speak so well, so many languages and no accent’, thought the wolf. He for sure couldn't talk properly, only a few sentences that he had picked up from vagrants. He was certain the lack of proper speaking was the downfall of his uncle, the wolf that made Little Red Riding Hood famous. If only he could steal the voice of that woman . . .

‘Hello my dearest wolf, don't you remember me? I’m Foxy!’ said the fox, who had been observing the wolf. ‘Isn't that music to your ears! You wish you could do that, too? I know how you can do it, how you can exchange your voice for hers.’

‘What do I do then?’ asked the wolf.

The fox whispered, ‘Well it's tricky. You have to wait till you see her going to the fountain to cool herself, and then quickly drink from the water at the same time. You have to say, Voce mutandis, and drink three sips from the fountain. That will do it.’

The wolf was tremendously happy to have a way to acquire that voice and did everything the fox had told him. The young woman was even amused that the wolf wanted to drink from same fountain. ‘No shyness’, she thought. When she heard him saying, Voce mutandis, it was already too late. The wolf had her voice, and she had his voice. At first it was tremendously hard for her to say anything at all. She could think in all the languages as before, could understand everything, but she couldn't speak or write them, for no one has ever seen a writing wolf.

Now the wolf, with that beautiful voice, had an identity crisis. The other male wolves made fun of him, and the she-wolf he fancied told him that she preferred a wolf with a male voice. So when the wolf and the fox crossed paths again, the wolf complained about his situation.

‘Yes that is tricky’, said the fox, ‘and what's worse, you can't get your voice back by using the magic words, Voce mutandis. But I know what can be done.’

The wolf wanted to beat the daylights out of the fox for giving him that voice, but he listened because the fox was suggesting a way to get his old voice back.

‘I will use the magic words, as you have done, so that I can give the woman my voice. In exchange, I will get your voice’, the fox said. ‘I cherish my voice with manifold accents, it makes me sooo sophisticated. But for you, I will give up my voice. It will make me sad, but you are depressed and we are good friends, so that's why I do it.’

The wolf said, ‘But then you’ll have my voice, and I’ll still have that voice that doesn't suit me, and . . .’

‘Wait, wait, I haven't finished yet’, the fox interrupted, ‘Because we haven't yet changed voices between the two of us with the magic words, we can still do it. You’ll have your voice back, and I’ll have the woman's voice. I want nothing from you, for the moment. But you know the woman's voice, without any accent, it is downsizing my identity. It's going to take quite some time to get used to. But’, said the fox, ‘when the time is right, I will come to get my reward from you. Is that a deal?’

‘Yes, the deal is good, so let's get on with it. I can't tolerate the situation of my voice for one minute longer’, said the wolf in a fluster.

So the fox was true to his word. After the magic incantation, Voce mutandis, was performed twice more, the wolf had his old voice back and the wily fox was the proud owner of the woman's voice with which to speak many languages with no accent and to sing beautifully.

Storytelling as Enquiry

Through writing this story, The Wolf, the Fox and My Voice, I experienced an incredibly strong reaction. In talking about the wolf, the concept ‘wolf – stroke’ opened up many emotions and sensations for me. I started to cry, and all my body felt incredibly heavy. In recounting it, I can feel similar sadness and heaviness in me. In writing this story almost from the wolf's point of view, I have engaged in imaginative variation. I gave the wolf and the fox a voice, which I didn't do with Aphasia. Yet I didn't write much about the feelings of that young woman: how she felt suddenly having her voice gone. I had to protect myself from those abysmal feelings. To go down into the blackness of emotions, I couldn't do it.

Yet I had the wolf and the fox converse about their likes and dislikes of their voices. I threaded humour into this account as well. I didn't want the wolf to be happy with his ‘stolen goods’ (stroke as ‘thief’; Mitchell, Skirton, & Monrouxe, Reference Mitchell, Skirton and Monrouxe2011), so I came up with a way to hurt his vanity. I can see a parallel with how I treated the depiction of Aphasia: ‘Cut her up and reassemble it’. Aphasia and the ‘wolf-stroke’ did HURT ME, and now I wanted to hurt them back. As I formulated this thought, tears welled up. I needed metaphors to let my anger out on the enciphered entity. I’m left with a diagnosis of cryptogenic stroke because doctors could give me no reason for it, and that is incredibly hard. I found myself asking over and over what the reason for the stroke could have been. Because all the doctors said there was no known physical reason in my case, I started to think that I caused it myself psychologically. I thought that I had willed myself to have a stroke from built-up guilt. In the first few years after my stroke, such thoughts recurred frequently. Now I have learned to discard such thoughts; they are not conducive to my getting better and are too restrictive.

When I started to read out my story, The Wolf, the Fox and My Voice, in the last MIECAT intensive, I began to cry. Unable to go on, I asked a fellow student to continue. I wept throughout the reading. It is one thing to commit a personal story to paper, but quite another to read it aloud in front of people. An amplification of emotions and feelings within oneself seems to happen at once. Writing something down is a first step, putting thoughts into written action. Now I can burn them, throw them in the rubbish or simply put them it in a drawer out of sight. Through having done the writing, I have let myself re-experience these events and emotions, to a certain extent engaging in a reflexive account, but then to read my narrative aloud and hear my own voice, in front of a group of people, that's a step further. Such an experience opens a way for emotion to well up, and in reading my story, I was suddenly overwhelmed by my emotions. I opened the door to the pain that I feel about what happened to me. At the moment, while writing this, I have tears in my eyes. I have, in my recovery, concentrated on getting better physically. I wanted to walk and talk as soon as possible and to be a person whom you couldn't tell had had a stroke when seeing me for the first time. And because I was not offered a psychologist to talk with during my rehabilitation (perhaps lost in my rehabilitation plans), I bottled up my pain. It was safer to do so. All the grieving for what I’ve lost was still within me. So when I started to read out the story, it was like opening the door to that grief which started to bubble over. Tears ran down my face, I wept and could not continue. I sensed pain all over my upper body. That's when I asked someone else to read out my story for me.

Reason and Hawkins (Reference Reason, Hawkins and Reason1988) speak of storytelling as enquiry. When I tell a story, I express meanings of experiences. I communicate meanings – meanings that didn't seem self-evident when I wrote them down but that seem to sprout forth when reading them aloud.

Intersubjective Response

As a response to my story being read aloud, other group members were invited to provide intersubjective responses. MIECAT places great value on these responses, in which group members reply to aspects of the person's enquiry that have touched them or given food for thought and action. I want to mention an intersubjective response I received from Alexandra that touched me in return. Alexandra wrote her intersubjective response in three languages: beginning in French, switching to English and finishing in Italian (Figure 4). The translation of Alexandra's words is shown in Box 1.

BOX 1

Translation of Figure 4.

FIGURE 4

Intersubjective response: ‘The magic of words (speech) is always with you’.

What Alexandra didn't know was that, especially when I’m tired and searching for words, I may remember the searched-for word in another language, which helps only when I’m in the company of other appropriately multilingual people. I made a drawing 2 years after the stroke (Figure 5), wanting to show what it means for me not being able to speak one language completely and uninterruptedly.

FIGURE 5

Loss of fluency in any language. Translation: The effect is (French) not much (German) but (English) the author (German) would like to maintain (English) that it seems (Italian).

Alexandra mentioned, ‘parce que je suis!’ Just the month before the stroke, I recorded a song that I composed myself called ‘Je suis, qui je suis’ (Box 2).

BOX 2

Je suis, qui je suis

I feel a multitude of sensations. I hold back my tears and the sensations, but I can’t. I’m tired. I rest my left cheek in my palm and lean again the back of my chair.

My sculpture (Figure 6), completed 7 years before my enrolment at MIECAT, depicts part of the Abgrund – abyss – that I felt. The stroke robbed me of my voice. The experience is still intensely painful. My scout nickname in Switzerland was ‘Lerche’, meaning ‘lark’. The bird has its heart pierced, but Alexandra lifted the bird up and gave it a voice, speaking to me. Magic.

FIGURE 6

Pierced heart: without voice (bronze on granite, by Corinne Othenin-Girard, 2002).

Searching for Words

A Japanese tanka poem, or ‘short song’, consists of 5 lines with 5–7–5–7–7 syllables and uses personification, metaphor and simile to allow the reader to visualise the writer's description and emotions. My poem is based on the tanka form:

I feel there is Commedia dell’Arte played on my stage: characters there one moment but gone the next. Words come and go, glide away, just as Hume (1739–40) described. I know they are there, in my mind, but where? I search everywhere to retrieve a word, sometimes several words. It is as if I’m on a word hunt. I can't hear what the word sounds like, but I know it's there because I recently heard it in a discussion or used it myself. But for the moment the words I search for have, to all intents and purposes, disappeared.

Reflecting on the Search for a Word: Phenomenological Description

I want to employ a word that I had two moments ago on my mental tongue. Now it is gone. In thoughts, I want to find the word that has hidden itself from my consciousness. I’m visualising entering into a vast bulbous space with tentacles. I have to venture into the tentacles and feel my way around in them, fishing for the word. I don't have the sound of this word in my mind's ear, so I can't hear it yet. All the while I’m actively seeking in my mind, I press my tongue tightly to the floor of my mouth, clench my jaws and direct my eyes to the left and up or just to the left. I’m breathing shallowly. My body is tensed overall, like a cat on the hunt. I try on shapes and compare them to the sensed shape of the searched-for word. I still haven't got it. Then I jump on to another wagon that takes me to the situation where the word was used, emotionally laden. Now I pinch my chin. For a moment I was really close. I’m sure it starts with ‘r’. Now I have an ‘other word’ that is strongly related to, and caused by, the searched-for word. At this point I would try to tap the memory of other people around me: I would give a roundabout description of the word and hope the person would retrieve it. At this very moment I’m alone, but I’m sitting in front of my computer and can use the computer's memory. I’m typing a description of that word: asbestos. I feel an immediate great release of all the tension, from my head down, an intense feeling of relief and elation.

In writing, when I don't find a word in my mind, I search on the computer and have, as well as the Word document I’m writing, a dictionary, a thesaurus, a German–English translator and sometimes a French–English translator, in all, a busy screen.

Opening up myself in the Enquiry

I’m reading Researching lived experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy by Max Van Manen (Reference van Manen1990), in which he states that phenomenological research encourages a person to re-learn, to look afresh and to totally immerse themselves in their experiences. As I focus on my experiences with changed speech, I can feel myself opening up. I envision this opening up more like a circle or a rainbow than having a lineal A-to-B-to-C form. It is the rainbow of thoughts that I became aware of, an opening up into manifold thoughts while being present to the experience. I see, think and sense myself following a network of thoughts that interweave. In my mind I simultaneously mull over Van Manen's quotation from Sartre (1956), ‘It is my body as it is for the Other which may embarrass me’ (Van Manen, Reference van Manen1990, p. 25), and, exchanging ‘body’ with ‘speech’, know that here lies a truth for me. I feel embarrassed about the way my speech is: knowing that I know how to speak but having something else come out of my mouth. I know also that, at my son's school, I got an awkward feeling about the way the teachers and principal behaved towards me and my speech difficulties: that teachers wanted to put my son in an ESL (English as a second language) class, not because he needed help with English, but because they thought that, due to my ‘poor English’, he couldn't learn it at home. So he was classified because of my deficit. The speech problem placed a burden on me, so that literally I sensed a weight on my back when I went to the school or to other places where I sensed people's changed behaviour towards me.

Another colour of the rainbow is remembrance of the sensation I had at the last assembly at my son's school, when I affirmed to myself that I was as good as everybody else, speech difficulties or not, and would no longer assume the burden and the ‘weighing me down’ feeling. I felt taller, sensing my back straightening. My worth is not diminished. I can speak up when I want to and talk about my speech difficulties on my own terms, without the exchange of heaviness.

A few weeks after the assembly, I was given another gift, a further intersubjective response, from Alexandra: ‘To help you go lightly through life′, it says on the outside, and inside is an armband delicately made from birds’ feathers (Figure 7). I hadn't mentioned anything to her about the feeling of burden of my shoulders, yet she sensed something, a pre-verbal sensation, and made this gift. She explained it to me as being a ‘babiche’, from an Alaskan tradition where they are made with feathers of white snow geese. She has substituted pink and white feathers from galahs (rose-breasted cockatoos), which carry the energy of joy.

FIGURE 7

‘To help you go lightly through life.’

Use of Dream in the Enquiry

A few days after formulating the subject of this article, I had a dream at the onset of sleeping. I was in a huge library with books from bottom to top and a rolling ladder, similar to the library in Montféry's (Reference Montféry, Quenet, Lère and Vanhollebek2009) animated feature film Kerity, la Maison des Contes (Eleanor's Secret in the UK and USA, official US trailer for Eleanor's Secret: http://www.gkids.tv/eleanor/). The film's central character Nathaniel, a young boy who is not a confident reader, is left a library of books by his Aunt Eleanor. He discovers that the books are the originals of all the famous fairy stories and, unless he can protect them by reading a magic inscription in the library, the characters and their stories will vanish from the world, so that only ‘real stories’ will remain. The library of my dream was tinged red-brown, as in the film. I was standing on the ladder, high up, and it was moving quietly. What looked like books from further away were now words, and I was searching as you do in libraries, but I was looking for words. I’m amazed at being in a library just for words.

Closing Reflection

This personal narrative about my speech difficulties has involved travel through some rocky terrain with torrents of emotion. Yet there are places still not visited. I went on a pilgrimage in solitude and found on the way some co-travellers. Sometimes I jumped over holes, sometimes looked into the abyss. I got to know more about myself, as you do on a pilgrimage.

The narrative and the writing of the story, The Wolf, the Fox and My Voice, gave me a release or a letting out of some of the immense grief and pain that I felt. Through writing this narrative account and re-reading it, I have come to know that I have not accepted my changed voice, which can be positive or not-so-positive: positive, because I still want to improve my speech and vocal capabilities; not-so-positive, because of the so-called accent and my need to constantly explain myself, which in turn seems to be excusing myself for something I didn't want but now have and am embarrassed about. This still weighs me down. The ‘transient’ phase – the mystery of transition that I want – is in my learning how to cope and work with the changed voice, WITHOUT just accepting the unchangeability of it.

Metaphor has provided a valuable focus and protection during my exploration and narrative, so that my closing message to clinicians would echo that offered by Ferguson et al. (Reference Ferguson, Worrall, Davidson, Hersh, Howe and Sherratt2010, p. 695): ‘Attention to the use of metaphoric expression may offer clinicians a window into how others involved in the collaborative therapy process are constructing their experience’.