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Stuttering and Miscommunication It's one of the saddest things. As people with stutter, many times we're unable to communicate when we want and how we want. This leads to us not communicating to others crucial things, at crucial points, in the crucial ways. Personally, because of my difficulty in conveying 'situation-appropriate' tones due to the fact that all my energy when speaking is going towards avoiding stuttering, people sometimes misinterpret me as being stoic, cold, apathetic, or even aggressive. This just digs me deeper into the cycle, as my only redemption with these people would be using verbal communication tools to explain myself and where I'm coming from- obvious disadvantage there. To add on to that, since as a person with stutter I don't speak as often as others do, people love nothing more than speaking for me and constructing their own stories of who and how I am based on their misinterpretations of me and their very limited verbal interactions with me. The traditional ways that I see people slyly maneuver tense situations with others? They involve verbal communication and tricks that many non-stutterers might not be aware of, yet do successfully on a daily basis. This is one of the reasons I think exposing people to stuttering via wide-reaching media outlets is crucial. Because the thing is, I’d bet all these people truly think they have great intentions and are great people (and many are), but if they were made aware of the unintentional at best, negligent at worse damage that they do to people with stutter, they’d feel bad for what they’ve done/do to us on a daily basis. I know some people will say that the onus is on us to communicate adequately and clearly with others, but many of us are currently on a process towards fluency. As in we’re not getting to 100% fluency and freedom from all the psychological impacts of stuttering tomorrow-it could be a few weeks, or months, or years. So it sucks that during our processes of improvement, we’re stuck with this. Excuse my rant, all the best everyone.