Where the storm learned my name

This poem draws on the lived experience of a stutter survivor raised in a regional Indonesian community where awareness of speech disorders remains critically limited. Stuttering is met not with support but with mockery, imitation, and shame, from peers, family, and society alike. Rather than protection, the child receives isolation and punishment, as though stuttering were a moral failing rather than a neurological reality. The poem bears witness to how such environments compound stuttering into layered trauma: the wound of the stutter, the wound of ridicule, and the deepest wound, being made to feel one's existence is a source of disgrace. Through images of locked rooms and paternal violence, it maps how compounded trauma forecloses possibility in childhood and persists into adulthood. Aligned with poetry therapy, the poem proposes creative writing as a space where the silenced self may begin, word by word, to arrive.