Did you hear Joe Biden stuttering tonight on the debate stage? When he did, I confess that my first thought was, “Is Uncle Joe losing it?” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former White House press secretary, was, shall we say, more critical:

She got carpet-bombed by people telling her that Biden has struggled with stuttering since childhood. Then Biden himself tweeted:

I’ve worked my whole life to overcome a stutter. And it’s my great honor to mentor kids who have experienced the same. It’s called empathy. Look it up. https://t.co/0kd0UJr9Rs

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) December 20, 2019

To her credit, Sanders tweeted back:

I actually didn’t know that about you and that is commendable. I apologize and should have made my point respectfully. https://t.co/fbmVAqDoWI

— Sarah Huckabee Sanders (@SarahHuckabee) December 20, 2019

I would love to join in piling-on Sanders, for a reason I’ll explain in a minute, but in all honesty, I did not know that about Biden either, and I kinda-sorta snickered when Biden got hung up on the word “I,” thinking it was just another Uncle Joe senior moment. True, I didn’t jump on Twitter and make fun of Biden — honestly, Twitter is a terrible thing — but watching how Sanders reacted, I can’t help but feel more than a twinge of “there but for the grace of God go I.”

Which makes me feel pretty bad, even though I said nothing mean on Twitter. There is someone in my family who has struggled for a long time with stuttering, as I myself did as a very small boy (they say stuttering, a neurological condition, runs in families). If anybody should know better than to make snap judgments about this kind of thing, it’s me. Had any of the other candidates on stage tonight gotten hung up on a word like Biden did, I would have been puzzled by it, but I wouldn’t have jumped to conclusions about a “senior moment.” But it fit a narrative, so I went there, at least in my mind. I didn’t make fun of Biden, to be clear, but I did think, “There he goes again!”

About having a “narrative,” a word. I learned online just now that John Hendrickson, an editor for The Atlantic who suffers from a very serious stutter, did a profile earlier this year of Biden the Stutterer. I hope you’ll read it. I came away from it with mad respect for Uncle Joe, and what he has overcome (and, frankly, for John Hendrickson). Check this out:

The cultural perception of stutterers is that they’re fearful, anxious people, or simply dumb, and that stuttering is the result. But it doesn’t work like that. Let’s say you’re in fourth grade and you have to stand up and recite state capitals. You know that Juneau is the capital of Alaska, but you also know that you almost always block on the j sound. You become intensely anxious not because you don’t know the answer, but because you do know the answer, and you know you’re going to stutter on it.

From long conversations with my family member who stutters, I know that he has felt (as Biden says he has) deep shame over it, watching the faces of other people as he (my kinsman) tries to say what’s on his mind. I’ve observed this myself in him. It is heartbreaking. It makes other people uncomfortable, because they don’t know how to behave. Strangers, he has told me, sometimes look at him as if he were mentally ill. I’ve seen this guy, my relative, come to tears talking about his struggles. He’s handsome and charming, and he doesn’t always stutter, but he told me that he thinks of it constantly, and has for years. The burdens people carry!

Reading the Biden profile, and how he was treated in school, brought to mind the stories my relative has told me about how some kids treated him in school. Heartbreaking and infuriating to think about. I don’t remember my own stuttering, because it went away by the time I made it to first grade, but my mother says it was significant. One of my sons struggled massively with stuttering when he was little, but it went away as he got older. I remember from those days learning that people who have no experience with stuttering or stutterers assume that they have control over it, and if they would just calm down, they would be able to speak.

In a way, I’m glad that Sanders’s mean tweet ended up sending me to that profile. Hendrickson writes:

A stutter does not get worse as a person ages, but trying to keep it at bay can take immense physical and mental energy. Biden talks all day to audiences both small and large. In addition to periodically stuttering or blocking on certain sounds, he appears to intentionally not stutter by switching to an alternative word—a technique called “circumlocution”—­which can yield mangled syntax. I’ve been following practically everything he’s said for months now, and sometimes what is quickly characterized as a memory lapse is indeed a stutter. As Eric Jackson, the speech pathologist, pointed out to me, during a town hall in August Biden briefly blocked on Obama, before quickly subbing in my boss. The headlines after the event? “Biden Forgets Obama’s Name.” Other times when Biden fudges a detail or loses his train of thought, it seems unrelated to stuttering, like he’s just making a mistake. The kind of mistake other candidates make too, though less frequently than he does.

How about that! How many of those “Uncle Joe senior moments” were not his mind failing in the senility sense, but Biden using strategies he learned decades ago to cope with his stutter? I’ve watched my kinsman (who is much younger than Biden) do the same thing. Maybe he got so good at it when he was a younger man that he hasn’t had to work at it for ages, but now that he’s aging, and under a lot of pressure, it’s not so easy anymore. (That’s not remotely disqualifying for the presidency, I hasten to say.)

I hope Joe Biden will use this unfortunate incident with Sarah Sanders to raise visibility for stutterers. In the Atlantic piece, Hendrickson writes:

During his 2016 address at the American Institute for Stuttering, Biden told the room that he’d turned down an invitation to speak at a dinner organized by the group years earlier. “I was afraid if people knew I stuttered,” he said, “they would have thought something was wrong with me.”

My first thought when I read that was to think that this shame is a generational thing for Biden. But then I thought about how my family member is a lot younger than Biden, and struggles with the same thing. The rest of us put this on stutterers. We can take it off of them, if we want to. Nothing to be ashamed about. I’m not at all a fan of Joe Biden’s politics, but reading that profile made me a fan of Joe Biden.

“Did you know that Joe Biden stutters?” I asked my kinsman last night. He did not. Just now I sent him the article. I know it’s going to give him courage, and hope. And for that, I thank Joe Biden, John Hendrickson, and yes, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.