What It’s Like to Have a Phobia of Talking

This story was originally published on The Wireless.

Fifteen years ago, when she was 17, Anna Clark sat on her bed with her diary. “I feel like I’m in the middle of an airport tarmac,” she wrote, “with everyone else outside in the green fields. I feel like someone trapped in a box.” She had always been painfully shy. As a child she was never without her satin comfort blanket, and in her first year of school she answered the teachers in just the smallest wisp of a voice. 

Then when she was six years old her voice began to disappear altogether, like the little white dot when you turn off an old-fashioned TV set—tiny, tinier, gone. Unless she was with her family, the words just would not come out. 

At 32 years old, they still won’t. 

Read more over on Broadly.