My 'strategy' I've been using for quite some time now: be very open about your stuttering!

My 'strategy' I've been using for quite some time now: be very open about your stuttering! I'm 22 now and I've been stuttering for pretty much my entire life, but my 'level' of stuttering has always fluctuated over weeks/months/years between very heavy stuttering and hardly noticeable stuttering. Probably like many, I always used to try to 'hide' my stuttering. I think that sounds worse than it actually is; it's more that I just tried to stutter as little as possible and when it happened when talking to people I just met, I just ignored it. However, the thing with my stutter is that I kind of have an unusual stutter: I don't stut-ut-ut-ut-utter, but I stutttttttttt-[long silence]-er. Most people don't recognize it as a stutter, and when I stay silent for a long time I often get the response like "are you alright?" or sometimes they think it's awkward that I just stopped talking in the middle of my sentence, assuming that I'm not going to continue so they just start talking about something else. Since about a year or maybe more, when I stutter to someone I just met, I immediately follow up with: "I stutter, by the way". It helped me in a couple of ways: 1) By doing it I feel like I removed the "elephant in the room" by clearing up what just happened. As a result, when I stutter again later in the conversation I feel less need to hide my stutter. When I stutter again, everyone knows what's going on and I don't feel insecure about it at all. 2) I feel like I come off more 'confident' if I just mention it and be cool and open about it. If I just keep stuttering time after time without addressing it, I might eventually become more nervous about it when it happens. Just *own* your stutter. 3) When I openly address my stuttering, people sometimes ask something about what it's like to stutter. I really like this situation, because then I can fully explain how it feels, what kind of situations are the hardest (like saying my name for example), or how stuttering has affected me. Like I said in my second point, it just shows that I'm really open about it. I'm comfortable talking about it, and I think that only looks good. It helps that I find the act of stuttering *super interesting*. I think it's super weird and interesting that I can predict different scenario's in my head within seconds, meaning that I know I'm going to stutter if I say a specific sentence right now, but that I know it's going to be fine if I just word the sentence differently. I think it's super interesting how alcohol or drugs influence my stutter - my speech improves after a few beers, but when I get more drunk it just gets so fucking bad. Weed is basically a cure for me, drastically reducing my stutter by like 99%. (btw, I'm curious to know if other people who stutter are interested in stuttering as well) ANYWAY, I'm not saying my approach is better than anyone else's, but I just wanted to share it as I think it may help some people.