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.

NINTH IN LINE, WAITING to read Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” I stare at my line, tracing each word but fixating on “beechen.” As each person in my lower English class reads line after line, I wonder if a filler word will make it sound smoother, but before I find one, my turn arrives. I haven’t planned a thing; the “b” sticks in my mouth, like it’s bound my lips shut. I push out sound, just a thread of breath between pursed lips, eyes closed tight, avoiding the gaze of everyone around me. By the third try, “beechen” finally breaks free. I finish the line, hands rising instinctively to my mouth—a shield, muffling whatever’s left of my voice. I go back to counting heads, finding my next line to stumble through.

Being the world’s 1% was supposed to be something great. But why this 1%, the 1% who stutters?

Since I was five, I’ve been part of that 1%. Back then, doctors assured my parents that I’d likely outgrow it—75% of kids did. Years passed, and I cycled through three rounds of speech therapy. In fifth grade, stuttering became a strange part of myself. Back then, nothing I said in class was graded, there were no formal discussions, no girls to impress in an all-boys school. But then came group presentations, the ones that were graded, where people began depending on me to perform well. I prayed we’d present through iMovie, where I could record at least twenty takes if I needed to, each one cutting away my stutters. But the presentations still happened, and my group mates looked down as I spoke, eyes fixed on their hands to avoid watching my face contort through syllables.

By sixth grade, dances started with the girls. I’d bring a list of questions, complete with answers I could practice—topics safe enough to keep control over my words. Still, it didn’t take long to see they weren’t interested in a guy who couldn’t even say “couple” in under five seconds. Why was this my 1%?

Seventh grade was the year I accepted my limitations, and my body obeyed, doing everything to keep my voice hidden. I spoke more softly, covered my mouth more often, and let my speech quicken until it blurred into an unintelligible hum. When I was elected to represent the seventh grade in student government, it didn’t feel like an achievement. It came with one line to deliver in front of the entire school during assembly: “This Tuesday of spirit week will be free dress.” Just one line, seemingly safe from my usual stumbling blocks. I pleaded with my mom to let me stay home. “Maybe I could come in after lunch or tell the faculty I’d quit?” But she stood firm, drove me to school, and walked me in. I managed to say the line without stuttering, but I vowed never to run for anything again that required me to speak before so many people. Another boundary, carefully set.

Eighth grade brought two new speech therapists. The first therapist’s waiting room brimmed with children no older than nine—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, him 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.

“Exactly. So why do you think you stuttered during your project on natural selection?”

Hope flickered for the first time, a small, distant light in the fog. Until now, I’d built boundaries and walls, a fortress to keep myself safe from judgment. But with Dr. Levine, the idea took hold that maybe, just maybe, there was a path out. Maybe I could shake free from this 1%. Our conversations peeled back layers, stripping away assumptions, until we unearthed what sat at the root: the fear of judgment—something nearly everyone shared.

It was in that cell of an office that hope first took root. Something about the space—a room stripped of the usual trappings of speech therapy, bare of posters showing vowel sounds or step-by-step breathing techniques—made the idea seem real. 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 fear I carried was universal, a shadow everyone knew, only mine had carved deeper paths, tangled with neural misfires.

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. And 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.

Suddenly, 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? We were all being evaluated. Each of us was desperate for recognition, a tally mark, a toothpick, a piece of candy, or whatever symbol the teacher used that day to measure our voices. We all glanced at the teacher after speaking, hoping to see our voice 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 to my classmates’. The realization was unavoidable, as every class, in every grade, existed under the same Harkness pressure. The comparisons haunted me, multiplying across subjects, a relentless tally of my silence.

Comparison was the pulse of Exeter, a constant obsession. I compared myself endlessly: my voice, my grades, even my place in the social hierarchy. Even in my prep fall I knew everyone’s GPA, how athletic they were, who 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. They were a wound I knew too well.

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, unable to lift the weight of expectations pressing down from every side. 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 was 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 silence or 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. The fortress was complete. I locked the doors and buried the key, sealing away what I believed to be my greatest weakness: silence.

By lower spring, I took a one-year medical leave, stepping away  to confront mental health challenges that extended beyond my stutter but were undeniably amplified by it. Silence came with me, but for the first time, it felt like a relief. I no longer had to compare myself to classmates, no longer needed to speak. I could retreat fully into the quiet I’d built for myself.

During my time on medical leave, freed from Exeter’s relentless pulse of comparison, I experienced a moment of self-reflection that I remain deeply grateful for. In that quieter space, I turned my focus inward, confronting different facets of myself—including my stutter. As I reflected, I began to notice an unexpected pattern: the significance wasn’t in where my stutter occurred, but rather where it didn’t.

One afternoon early in my leave, my mom burst into my bedroom, the door slamming against the wall as if she’d nearly unhinged it. Startled, I rolled over in bed, groggy from another aimless day, only to find her face inches from mine. Her sea-blue eyes flashed with frustration, strands of blonde hair disheveled from rushing up the stairs. “You missed Dr. Jacob again? You can’t keep skipping therapy appointments! You’re here to get better!” Her voice was sharp, cutting through the fog of my self-imposed isolation. Angry at myself, at the world, and now at my mom for yelling, I leapt from bed, hair a chaotic mess, and launched into the most impassioned rant of my life. Words spilled out—every grievance, every frustration, every ounce of pain I had bottled up. My rant stretched on, perhaps as long as a meditation, and when I finally paused, breathless, my mom simply said, “You have to go next time.”

Sitting back down, I expected to feel the familiar churn of teenage resentment, the urge to scroll through my phone to drown out my anger. But something stopped me. I couldn’t stay mad. In those 15 minutes of venting, I hadn’t stuttered once.

Why? Why didn’t I stutter? The thought nagged at me. It wasn’t just during that one heated moment—I realized I rarely stuttered around my family at all. My mom, my dad, my brother—they never had to endure the fragmented speech that plagued me at Exeter. But why? They were people, too. Shouldn’t I have stuttered, especially in the heightened emotions of medical leave? I spent months unraveling this question, revisiting it in moments of reflection. Eventually, I realized that in these spaces where fear might have flourished, there was something stronger: trust.

I trusted my family. I trusted them to care for me, love me, and—most importantly—not judge me. This absence of judgment uprooted the fear that Dr. Levine and I had identified as the root of my stutter years ago. With my family, I wasn’t paralyzed by fear because judgment wasn’t part of the equation. But how could I bring this sense of trust into a place like Exeter, where judgment seemed to define every interaction?

The beginnings of an answer came to me through Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher-emperor of Rome. In his personal journal, Meditations, he urged himself to reflect on what lies within one’s control, asserting that others’ judgments of us are beyond our influence. This insight applied directly to my stutter: I couldn’t control how others judged it. In fact, I realized people might judge me to be a bad speaker even without my stutter, so why waste energy fretting over something outside my power? Embracing this simple truth became a lifeline—a source of trust I could carry back into Exeter to combat the fear that had thrived there.

The spring of 2023 I returned to Exeter to finish out my lower year, and armed with the notion that I couldn’t dictate others’ opinions, I came in trusting my new belief and my fresh new perspective on my stutter.

Firstly, yes! Yes, my stutter did improve and I gradually became more social and talkative with others; however, classrooms remained the most difficult battleground. Speaking up was still my greatest fear, but I pushed through. Citing text felt like navigating a storm, reading aloud was a trial of nerves, but I did it—I spoke. I even stopped counting heads each time something written was read out loud to practice removing filler words and adding words back to my vocabulary from my subconscious prison. Regardless, I couldn’t decide how to feel about this voice of mine, still tangled with stutters. I worried constantly if every pause and break was being judged, but I clung to one thought: I had no power over others’ judgments. That belief kept me speaking, even as comments on my final report that spring appeared: “If Alex could improve his brevity.” “It is sometimes hard to understand Alex’s points; if he could articulate better it would help.” My grades reflected their feedback—progress, yet falling short of what I felt I deserved. I repeatedly saw that those who spoke more fluidly often received higher grades, a result of factors beyond my control. I don’t fault the teachers for this; it’s difficult to view someone with a stutter as a top Harkness participant. The more I fought my internal limits, the more external barriers seemed to push back.

I had conquered much of my own internal limits and it seemed unfeasible to make any more progress with the value of my, especially with external barriers providing an edge to how valued my voice could be. I accepted the external limitations as the year drew to a close, and through the entirety of my upper year, acknowledging my speaking struggles as part of me. Yes, I was frustrated that my voice seemed less valued and, at times, outright angry, but after almost 14 years, it was familiar. I accepted the moments of silence that would bring my value down, I accepted this burden of my 1%.

That summer, my family was fortunate enough to travel to Kyoto, a city where tradition and serenity seemed woven into every corner. We wandered through ancient temples, their wooden beams polished smooth by centuries of hands, and lanterns hanging like sentinels from their eaves. The faint sweetness of incense curled upward from bronze burners, mingling with the soft glow of candlelight that illuminated gilded statues and delicately painted paper screens. Outside, Zen gardens stretched out in meticulously raked patterns of sand and stone, inviting contemplation. Koi fish glided just beneath the surface of still ponds, their vibrant orange and white bodies moving like living brushstrokes through the water. Bamboo groves swayed gently, their slender stalks tapping together in a rhythmic melody, while moss blanketed the ground in lush, emerald hues. The leaves overhead shifted and whispered as though in conversation with the wind. And yet for all the vivid beauty, what struck me most was the silence. In these sacred spaces, words seemed unnecessary. Silence wasn’t just present—it was cherished, a profound presence in itself.

I know that for 99% of people, including my family, the temples and the craftsmanship within them would have been the most awe-inspiring part of our trip to Kyoto. But for me, it was the value placed on silence. This was the first culture, the first city, the first place where silence held profound meaning. The realization shook my belief system and planted the seeds of a new possibility: that silence could uplift my relationship with my speech rather than diminish it.

Immediately after returning home, instead of collapsing onto my bed, I rifled through the philosophical books I had read before, searching for a reflection, a quote, that echoed my newfound respect for silence. As pages fluttered through my hands, the ink of my own annotations smudging my fingers, Plato’s words emerged: “Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools speak because they have to say something.” I paused, struck by how much this sentiment reflected my own experience. My time at Exeter had turned me into the fool Plato described. I had been driven to speak not from genuine thought but from a desperate need to contribute, to prove myself. While I had learned to trust that I couldn’t control how others judged me, I lacked trust in my own words because they weren’t truly mine. They were carefully crafted responses, calculated to please the teacher and boost my grade. Armed with the ideas I had encountered in Kyoto and this philosophical reflection, I began to see silence—not as my enemy but as a source of power. Could I bring this understanding back to Exeter?

To build trust in my own words, I knew I had to fundamentally shift how I approached the Harkness experience. I started reading not to hunt for contributions but to absorb and reflect. That 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. At first, my points weren’t the most strategic for securing an A, but they were mine. 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. How could I feel anything but grateful for my place in this 1%?

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.