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Fighting fit Miss B.C. Hannah Seaman may be competing for the title of Miss World Canada next month, but she has nothing left to prove BRENDA ANDERSON Times Reporter
F
or much of her childhood, Hannah Seaman woke up every morning wishing she was someone else. Anyone else. As a young teen, the Langley Fine Arts School student would spend weekends alone in her room playing video games, doing her best to avoid being seen or heard. “It’s not a healthy thing for a 13-yearold girl to do,” Seaman, now 22, acknowledges. But if she hid, perhaps it’s understandable, because the Langley woman was bullied the majority of her childhood, simply for being different — for stuttering. “I didn’t know how to make friends, how to keep friends, how to be social,” she said of her early school years. “It sucked.” Today, as the reigning Miss B.C., Seaman is getting set to compete for the title of Miss World Canada. But in many ways she’s already won a much more valuable prize — self-acceptance. With her sparkling dark eyes and infectious smile, combined with a quick wit and relaxed demeanor, it’s tough to picture the old Hannah as she describes herself. Although she stumbles over a few words, there aren’t too many sounds that appear to give her a lot of difficulty anymore. She quips that whenever she goes to a Starbucks they write Anna on her cup, because she can’t always pronounce the H. But as she entered her teenage years, Seaman’s stutter made her feel so insecure that she would second guess every decision she made — right down to the clothing she chose to wear. “I never felt good enough,” she said. “We’ve all got our insecurities, but my stuttering just amplified it. My speech was a lot worse then. “I would come home from school mentally and physically exhausted. My jaw hurt from trying to talk.” It was an unexpected visit from one of the Fort Langley school’s teachers that set her on a new path.
Hannah Seaman, will compete for the title of Miss World Canada on May 8 and 9 at River Rock casino in Richmond. The Langley woman plans to speak on a topic that is all too familiar to her — stuttering.
Miranda GATHERCOLE/ Langley Times
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“Darren (Storsley) came into one of my classes when I was in Grade 8,” Seaman recalled. Storsley, a former pageant competitor himself, is the director of the Miss/Mrs/Miss Teen BC pageant. “He showed us the video from the year before and, it’s hard to explain, but something inside me kind of snapped — I thought, ‘I’m tired of living my life like this.’ Seaman was finally ready to step outside the walls she’d built around herself. “I told my parents about the pageant that night; they were shocked,” she said. Her mother, in particular, was worried that she was setting herself up for heartbreak. “My mom was always very protective of me. She thought other people would view my stuttering as a weak point.” Even if that was true, Seaman was done letting other people’s opinions — real or perceived — dictate how she felt about herself. Someone once told her that she would always be a wallflower. “I said, ‘No, life’s not going to be that way for me.’ ••• Seaman’s speech, which had been developing normally, began to deteriorate when she was in Grade 2, said her mother, Francine Seaman. It was actually a teacher who noticed first. The signs didn’t start showing up at home for another year, after the family moved and Seaman changed schools. “It was in December, we were walking home from school and I realized Hannah really needed help,” said Francine. “That year, I got her into an intense summer program for stutterers.” But all it seemed to do was make the little girl more aware that she was different. At school, her inability to quickly express a thought made it tough to connect with others her age. “Kids talk over kids, that’s pretty normal,” said Francine. “That’s the really difficult thing for children who stutter — why they don’t have a big network of friends. “As far as the bullying, I don’t even know everything she went through.” So the idea that her daughter now planned to step out onto a stage in front of a crowd of strangers was a bit alarming. continued, PAGE 10
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