"I'll always be a stutterer. But that doesn't mean I'll always stutter." I love this! My story is similar to yours. I was fortunately able to attend speech therapy at a young age and I found I had to sort of weave the various techniques (chewing gum speech, soft speech) into my natural manner of speaking. Took years, still don't consider myself to be completely fluent at 27 but I that's just my own pressure, most people I speak to say they don't hear it. But you are absolutely right. I find the stutter doesn't weigh on me anywhere near as much as it did as a kid having had fully developed the tools to combat it. I remember vividly having to attend lunchtime detention when I was 13 and it took me 5 minutes and lots of laughing from the people in the room until I could say the first syllable of my name. Today I had a job interview and I think I'll get it. But I was also very fortunate in that I found a lot of people in my life were incredibly understanding and intuitive of what I needed. I wasn't told to hurry up or calm down or try again or have my sentences finished (for the most part). I was rarely bullied (admittedly I was quite a big lad) or patronised for it (and if I do in my later years I really don't care), and I think that protection from a lot of the anxiety that comes with stuttering has probably been 50% of my progress.