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Challenge yourself I've been a stutter since I can remember. When I was little I can't remember my dad trying everything to help. Speech therapists, hypnotherapy, getting my hearing tested, psychological experts treatments for asthma... I mean everything I have really bad social anxiety, so much so that I couldn't pick up the phone. Grabbing a pick up order at a pizza place when I was 14 or so is still the most scared I have ever been in my life... My stutter is accompanied by facial ticks that make me look like I'm having a seizure. I've tried foot stomping humming singing my words almost everything but it never really got better like one would expect... Instead of fixing the stammer I got really good at hiding it. Instead of people thinking I was defective (my own paranoia probably) they started just thinking of me as a little weird... With my warped sense of humour I managed to turn a stutter into comedy and facial ticks into theater. It worked for a while.. I fell for a girl and did the scariest thing I could imagine to spend more time with her... I started working in her families weekend business selling hipster pizza to, well... Hipsters... Customer service... Yes... Forced Social interaction every Saturday for 9 hours at a time... I'll spare you the details of how that ended but here I am now 6 years later on a different continent after working as an order taker in a Wendy's drive through, a cashier in a dollar store, phone salesman and now... My personal boss fight... A call centre. The truth is exposing myself to something that scares the absolute crap out of me daily, literally forcing myself to go through what I think of as pure and unadulterated torture has actually become my biggest asset. If you had told me that as a child that my job was picking up ringing phones and talking to upwards of 80 angry people a day I probably would have crawled into a tiny little ball and wait for the ground to consume me and rid me of my miserable life. I think what I'm trying to say is that poison... Taken in the right quantities and the right circumstances can be a cure. I'm not better and I have terrible days but I think when I look back and where I've been and where I am now, I really realise that time and willpower is a truly magic combination (sorry for the longwindedness. Lots of words on quivering lips generally leave a lot left unsaid)