My response to the question, "What do you do?" has been a journey as a speech-language pathologist.
"Speech-language pathologist" is unquestionably a mouthful.
For reasons I'll try to explain below, it has taken me a couple of decades to feel comfortable uttering these three words in response to questions about what I do.
During the earliest part of my career, I often dreaded the "What do you do?" question we all get when first meeting someone. Even though I had spent the better part of a decade becoming a licensed SLP, those three words felt a little grandiose and pedantic coming out of my mouth. I also did not expect that most people would know what speech-language pathology was, so I initially settled on, "I help kids who have communication problems."
This worked for a while, but I eventually started to feel like I was being unnecessarily mysterious about my job. The people I was speaking with would usually ask follow-up questions, and would often know about speech-language pathology. I knew I needed a better answer.
I then began to respond to the question with, "I'm a speech therapist," often bracing for the person to respond with an admission that they had received speech therapy in school, and, sometimes, how mean the therapist had been! (Anyone else cringe to their core while reading Chapter 1 of Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris!? 😬)
(I've worked hard to make my therapy room a safer space for kids. I wrote a post about it here. And, unless his articulation issue was a significant barrier to his success as a student, David Sedaris would never qualify to receive speech and language therapy at school, at least these days...)
I stuck with the "I'm a speech therapist" response for years, but it never felt great, or particularly genuine. It felt like I was diminishing what I do, reducing it down to "playing games and fixing lisps," and not challenging people's assumptions of that. (See this blog post for a powerful graphic that illustrates what speech-language pathologists are actually doing in articulation therapy.)
Over time, I also became increasingly aware of the misconceptions people have about our profession, even the educators we work with. The "language" component of our title is huge and pretty central to the work I specialize in and am passionate about these days. By referring to myself as a speech-language pathologist, I'm acknowledging and advertising the considerable scope of what we do in the realms of both articulation and language. If we don't advocate for ourselves, who will?
I'll admit, I still get stuck on the "pathologist" component. Pathology is the study of disease, which is a nod to our medical knowledge and ability to diagnose communication disorders, but it sounds unduly serious, in my opinion. In addition, a lot of what we do is not related to disease, perse.
Perhaps "speech-language specialist" is where I'd ideally like to land.
But for now, I'm sticking with "I'm a speech-language pathologist" when people ask. It's the title our profession has collectively agreed on, and I think it's good to unify under it.
What do you call yourself when people ask what you do for a living? Has it been as fraught for you as it has been for me? Leave a comment below.
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Have you heard? StoryWhys now offers the Speech and Spell series of resources. I am always trying to tie articulation work and spelling together in my therapy and I've never found any good resources out there to help me do this. So I made my own! Many more speech sounds and spelling rules to come. They'll be 50% off for 48 hrs when new resources are added to the StoryWhys store. Find them here.
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Enjoy!
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