Harem Windows — Jonathan Shan
In India and other parts of the Islamic world, travelers can still see architectural relics from the Ottoman Empire, which include one-way windows called mashrabiya, or “harem windows.” These small carved screens allowed the women to observe life outside their private quarters while remaining invisible to passersby. Through the window, they might see traders bustling through the market, street performers, or merchants hawking wares, but they could only watch. Though I live in an entirely different world, I grew up feeling like I was looking out at a vibrant world I couldn’t participate in simply because I couldn’t speak normally.
I barely talked as a child. Until eighth grade, I stuttered so badly that it was almost impossible to complete a sentence. At first, I didn’t realize this was a problem. I lived in my head and learned to delegate tasks to different parts of my mind. I couldn’t express my ideas verbally, so I discussed them with myself. I developed a way to simultaneously think through a writing assignment and plan for the next project, while a smaller part of me would notice the pinpricks of light shining through the blinds or the way my fingers felt on the keys of my Chromebook.
I only understood how poor my verbal skills were in middle school when my mom wanted me to join a debate class to be able to debate like my brother. The first time I did debate, I stuttered through my case with a garbled line of reasoning. I was so accustomed to my interior logic that when I tried a more linear process for debate, it was like ice skating for the first time.
That wasn’t even the worst part—that came during the crossfire round, where I got so overwhelmed I lost my train of thought and started agreeing with my opponents. The other kids groaned when I was put on their team, and even after I dropped out, the embarrassment stuck to me. I mentally replayed the humiliation again and again, cringing at my failed attempt to leave the safety of my mashrabiya to join normal life. After that incident, I decided the outside world wasn’t worth joining. I never tried debate again.
Meanwhile, my older brother Nathan loved to read and talk, facilely dissecting arguments and constructing better ones. According to my mother, Nathan read hundreds of books each semester. According to my dad, Nathan learned advanced math in his sleep. While my brother was breezing through academics, I spent school hours daydreaming with my best friend and building little gadgets to shoot at each other during class. At home, I watched video game tutorials and piled Minecraft blocks while Nathan piled one award on top of the other. I tried to avoid my dad and his geometry lessons, and my mom with her reading lists and constant reminders of how successful Nathan was. To appease her, I would sometimes check out library books, but only if they had a cool cover.
Every failure, whether it was learning math with my dad or getting low grades on English essays, felt like a confirmation of an inner defect, proof that my ceiling was lower than the one metric I always compared myself to: Nathan. I felt small in my own skin, merely a shadow behind a one-way window, watching him accumulate trophies and fluently converse with the larger world.
So when I hit a challenge in school or even games, I began giving up. My default assumption was that I was incapable, inherently a few steps behind everyone else. I thought that was how it would always be. I decided to stay in my comfort zone to avoid feeling dumb. But that only made the window smaller.
Since I believed I was physically and mentally impaired at speaking, I was too scared to talk to others to improve my speech; conversations carried on without me, as if I had hit mute on my own life. Whenever I tried to slip in a joke to catch attention, my words stumbled out, meeting with blank stares. It was demoralizing when I attempted a joke and nobody laughed. Of course, being social and making friends is how we build confidence and a sense of self. However, trying to socialize but ending up on the sidelines does the opposite. In a group of rowdy boys, you have to assert yourself to be heard. Since I couldn’t do that, people couldn’t understand what I was trying to say, and I became the sidekick friend who tags along. I didn’t want to keep trying since I believed I wasn’t cut out to connect. The window kept shrinking.
This didn’t make it easier around girls either—instead, it got a lot worse. Once, as I walked home from school with my friends and a girl I was interested in, I tried asking her, “Did you have a good day?” Instead, I blurted out, “How day was your good?” I tried to correct myself. “Was your good day?” My friends cracked up, and the girl gave me a pitying look before turning to talk to them. To be honest, at that moment, I just wanted to go hug a speeding car. That's how I imagine what it might have been like for a harem woman behind the window, calling out to someone in the street. Everyone turns their heads momentarily, but quickly loses interest.
The unfortunate part about not being able to form your words correctly isn’t just the embarrassment of delivering your thoughts the wrong way—it’s the frustration of feeling like your entire self is locked inside, visible only to you. My humor, my point of view, my feelings, everything that made me me, was muffled before it could reach anyone else. It’s not that I was just stumbling over my words, but rather I was losing pieces of my identity. It was as if the world only saw the hesitation, the pauses, the garble, and not the person behind them. That gap created a different kind of shame, and not just the shame of failure in the moment, but the ache of invisibility afterward. I felt like I was walking around with two selves: one alive in my head, witty and opinionated, and the public self: silent, awkward, diminished. The distance between them was crushing to my 13-year-old mind, who just wanted to socialize. To watch the best parts of yourself trapped behind stutters you can’t control is like being pressed against glass, pounding to be let out while life continues on the other side.
That was when the epiphany struck me: my speech impediment wasn’t just an inconvenience—it was going to ruin me if I tried to ignore it.
I began reading books aloud, even if my tongue twisted the words. At first, it felt clumsy, like dragging a broken pencil across paper, but this time, I kept going. I practiced speaking clearly, even using different accents to make practice playful rather than grueling. It might have been easy to retreat back to silence, where failure wasn’t so obvious. But I forced myself to keep going, page after page, because I knew staying in my comfort zone was exactly what had trapped me in the first place. It was more grueling than I expected. My mouth would run dry quickly and get tired, causing me to face the same frustration and wrestle with words that refused to come easily. My family thought I was being goofy, but I didn’t care. I knew staying quiet was safer and easier, but I was tired of being safe and easy. Slowly, the blur in my speech began to sharpen. There were small milestones I still remember. The first time I got through a paragraph without tripping. The first time a joke rolled off my tongue, the way I’d heard it in my head. The first time I heard shared laughter bounce back at me instead of the usual blank silence. These moments, brief as they were, made me feel heard for the first time. They gave me hope that maybe, just maybe, my voice could belong in the room and I could truly say the things I’d wanted to say without being mocked or ignored.
It wasn’t a straight line. Some days, the stutter returned, and I would feel myself sliding back into old habits of silence. I still struggled to organize lengthy explanations without my thoughts scattering, but when I started seeing progress, I leaned harder into practice. I treated every conversation like another drill to train myself not to slip up and organize my thoughts into more comprehensible sentences.
Gradually, I noticed I no longer dreaded speaking. In class discussions, I raised my hand before the old voice of doubt could stop me. In casual conversations, I started telling stories without bracing for interruption. I was even able to improvise humor, and when people actually laughed with me instead of at me, it felt like proof that I belonged in the moment.
Since then, I’ve come a long way, but obviously not without a struggle. I’ve learned how to carry my voice into rooms that once intimidated me, winning business pitches, even the impromptu ones, and stepping into leadership roles across the clubs I now lead. I no longer have the fear that I’ll stumble over my words and make a fool out of myself. I am no longer like the harem women kept behind the mashrabiya, watching the world happen without me, because I thought I couldn’t get out. I pushed through the screen, and now the clamorous marketplace includes the sound of my laughter.
Jonathan Shan is a high school writer based in Maryland who splits his time between writing, building apps, and chasing ideas that refuse to leave him alone. His work explores how numbers, technology, and small moments shape identity, and he recently submitted a few essays to Scholastic. A glass half full person on good days and half empty on honest ones, he hopes to keep writing pieces that ask better questions than they answer.