My employment history has spanned retail to hard labour to aviation. My last job, and what I thought would be my career, was working as an Aircraft Systems Technician, or Aircraft Mechanic, in the Royal Canadian Air Force. I spent nearly eleven years in that position, but my speech made me feel as though I didn’t really deserve to be there. Even after I earned the top student award on my trade training course, and was awarded any posting of my choice, my rock-bottom self confidence, resulting from my speech ensured I would never achieve at the levels of which I was truly capable. Despite winning multiple awards for various personal achievements, I still felt completely incompetent. No one ever listened to any of my suggestions, and I felt like I offered very little to the team, in general. Eventually, my self-doubt and raging imposter syndrome got the better of me, and I put in my release. I left the military in October 2012, and haven’t worked a day since. I’ve never collected, or even applied for any type of government assistance, thanks to my wife, who was luckily able to support the two of us quite easily. Unfortunately, she left me last November. I’m still in our condo, which I will be selling soon. With my part of the sale, I plan to buy a Sprinter or Transit van, and convert it into a nice home for my shiba inu and me to live in, as we travel North America. I should have enough left over after buying and converting the van to keep us going for a few years. After that, I guess we’ll see. It is good to see the success stories which are a product of people pushing themselves beyond their comfort zones, but I think it’s important for stutterers to know that is not always the reality. When I pushed myself to achieve, I became incredibly unhappy, and filled with self-doubt. It destroyed my self-confidence, and made me feel as though I was nothing more than a horribly incompetent person. It was a nightmare which I’m very happy to no longer be experiencing. I’m sure many stutterers are much happier avoiding the extremely stressful rigour of everyday life, than they could ever be speaking to a class, or making endless phone calls. If you actually enjoy that, then that’s great, I truly envy you. But if you’d rather not have to push yourself every single day, forcing yourself to perform uncomfortable tasks which turn you into a self-doubting ball of stress, then that is okay too… and totally understandable.