Value in Silence

Each winter and spring, members of the senior class take to the lectern in Phillips Church, in front of peers, instructors and friends to deliver meditations. There is no template or paradigm for a meditation. Most are personal and evolve from thinking about life and one’s place in it. Here is an excerpt of the meditation Alex Field ’25 shared with the community this spring.

Eighth grade brought two new speech therapists. The first therapist’s waiting room brimmed with children no older than 9 — a quiet reminder of my own small voice. Ms. Schmidt, the therapist I saw, offered tips. “Stand more confidently,” she’d say, as if I knew what that looked like. We practiced whispering “ha” before every word, ran through the alphabet on an endless loop, and then did it again. It felt as though our sessions, too, had fallen into a loop. My voice would not be set free by standing with my hands on my hips, nor by sounding as if I were on the edge of laughter before each word. But the second therapist that year brought something new.

Dr. Levine’s office stood apart; there was no waiting room, just a maze of identical offices in a complex filled with doctors, lawyers and brokers, each space resembling a cell. He was tall and lean, with a nose that drooped slightly, causing his glasses to rest perpetually low on his face. His skin was pale — uncommon for California — and his almond-brown eyes hinted at a quiet sharpness, framed by hair streaked with gray. He wore his watch facing inward and held a clipboard, pen ready. We sat on heather-gray furniture: I on a couch, he in an oversized chair. My gaze swept the room for the typical signs of speech therapy —posters of syllables, alphabets — but instead, I found shelves adorned with trinkets from all over the world: little keepsakes from South America, Africa, Europe and Asia. His words tumbled out like confetti, light and unexpected, each one vivid and free. He even swore on occasion, which, strangely, made him feel more relatable. In that first session, we didn’t even touch the word “stutter.” I wondered, Is this guy even a therapist?

By the fourth session, we hadn’t touched the alphabet. I finally asked him why.

“I’m not here to change the way you pronounce letters,” he said. “I’m here to help you find out why you stutter.”

“Why I stutter?” I echoed, surprised. “What does that mean?”

“Well,” he said, “if you had a reason for stuttering, and we found it and removed it, would you still stutter?”

“I … don’t think so?” I answered, uncertainty lacing my voice.

It was in that cell of an office that hope first took root. It wasn’t about phonetics or practice drills but an excavation of why my voice betrayed me, why fear strangled words in my throat. For the first time, I believed my stutter was something I could overcome. The fortress I’d built around myself didn’t feel impenetrable anymore. The 1% suddenly seemed less isolating.

The focus of our work shifted, not to erasing the stutter but to loosening its grip, loosening my own grip on the shame that came with it. Bit by bit, I released my old habits, taking mindful steps: My hand wandered away from my mouth; I held eye contact a little longer when I spoke. Each small shift felt momentous.

Then, the next year, Phillips Exeter Academy loomed — a place where speaking wasn’t just inevitable but required, where Harkness tables filled with the country’s brightest minds waited for every word. Here, speech was graded, each voice weighed in the balance. I could feel judgment in the air, sharp as glass, pressing in from all sides. The stutter, a familiar burden, was suddenly magnified. It was no longer just about speaking but about being seen and, ultimately, evaluated for every slip, every pause, every missed beat.

Those five seconds it took for my first word to form felt like an eternity, each heartbeat filled with the start of three different points from other people — some who had already spoken multiple times. Who could blame them? Each of us was desperate for recognition, a tally mark. A toothpick or a piece of candy, we tossed into the middle of the table each time we spoke, small tokens of participation measured against the silence. We all glanced at the teacher after speaking, hoping to see our voices acknowledged with a scribble in their notepad, to feel that our words had weight.

By the end of class, I’d always have extras — untouched toothpicks or candy — clear markers of how little my voice was valued compared with my classmates’.

Comparison was the pulse of Exeter, a constant obsession. I compared myself endlessly: my voice, my grades, my place in the social hierarchy. Even in my prep fall I knew everyone’s GPA, how athletic they were, whom they liked. Later in Exeter it turned into their SAT scores, and, in the coming months, where they’d go for the next four years. It was almost impossible not to judge, to make silent comments, to wonder what others thought. If I was dissecting someone else’s value, then surely they were doing the same to me. And when it came to my voice, I knew where I stood. Even though I never heard the judgment out loud, the silence in my classmates’ faces when I spoke in class made me think I shouldn’t risk speaking at all. These actions mirrored the feedback in my prep fall comments: “I would love to hear more of Alex’s thoughts at the table.” “If he could articulate a little better and make his points clearer.” “If he just spoke more.” By lower year, I stopped reading the comments altogether.
I tried to return to what I’d learned from Dr. Levine, that my fear of speaking was rooted in a universal fear of judgment. But this time, it was more than social anxiety. My fear was tangled up in a web of academic pressure, the looming threat of lower grades, and the constant awareness that I was being measured. The strategies Dr. Levine had given me felt powerless against this reality. The fortress I’d tried to dismantle began to rebuild itself, stone by stone.

I recall how my fortress began to build itself rapidly during prep spring, just after I realized how every teacher critiqued my speaking ability. It was my first English class of the term, and the teacher had handed out a poem for us to read aloud — a warm-up exercise in Harkness discussion to help us get comfortable. My stomach knotted, the tension rising to my throat, as Mark Strand’s “Eating Poetry” fluttered onto the scuffed wood of the Harkness table in front of me. As the class began to read, others underlined key phrases and noted repetitions, finding patterns to analyze. I, however, was counting heads, marking the line I’d be assigned. One, two, three … six. Sixth line — where was it?

Instead of looking for themes, I scoured the text for words that might trip me up, rehearsing filler words to patch over silences. When I reached “she walks with her hands in her dress,” I dissected the line. “Hands,” I thought. My tongue could fumble the “h.” What if I stuttered? Um, hands. I repeated it twice in my head. But “dress” — that would be the real challenge. Words with hard “d” sounds were treacherous, and I knew no amount of filler words could save me if I faltered. As my turn approached, I accepted defeat. When I finally spoke, the rehearsed words tumbled out as if I were a lagging Netflix show, but my mind echoed with critiques I’d received before. The judgment, real or imagined, silenced me for the rest of class.

My strategies for safety — the filler words, the avoidance — spilled into other parts of my life. Words that caused my stutter were quietly removed from my vocabulary. Even with my friends, I avoided speaking for fear of failure, steering clear of jokes or storytelling. Soon, I withdrew entirely, dodging hangouts and leaving group chats unread, afraid my words might be critiqued there, too. I locked the doors and buried the key, sealing away what I believed to be my greatest weakness: silence.

To build trust in my own words, I knew I had to fundamentally shift how I approached the Harkness experience. By senior fall, my annotations evolved. They were no longer rehearsed arguments scrawled in the margins, designed to be spoken flawlessly in class. Instead, they captured my genuine reactions to the text — my thoughts, my questions, even the occasional “HAHA” next to a passage I found funny. For the first time in a Harkness setting, I was myself. A quiet person by nature, I spoke less, but when I did, my words carried weight. Slowly, my trust in my own voice began to dissolve not the fear of judgment from others, but the judgment I so often directed at myself. And with that shift, my stutter began to decrease. For the first time, I discovered moments of joy in speaking. I stopped fixating on the teacher’s reactions, on whether my classmates would lower their heads to avoid watching me struggle through syllables during read-alouds, or on the comments I might receive at the end of the term.

That fall also brought another revelation: gratitude. How could I not feel thankful for something that had shaped my growth, offered me a unique perspective, and given me countless opportunities to practice becoming the person I wanted to be? Yes, I still stuttered through senior fall, but I didn’t hide behind my hand or lose myself in frantic scribbling, drowning in shame. Trust anchored me, and gratitude helped me grow, allowing me to keep speaking.

Would I wish away my stutter? Absolutely. But to see my journey as fruitless would be to ignore the resilience, growth and courage it fostered in me.

Alex Field ’25 was a member of the varsity lacrosse team and co-founder and co-head of the mental health club on campus. Alex will attend NYU in the fall; he plans to major in business.

This article was first published in the spring 2025 edition of The Exeter Bulletin.