My continuing journey with stuttering

My continuing journey with stuttering *Some parts of the following post will be either positive, or neutral. Other parts will be negative. If you are someone who battles with shame - which is ok - over stuttering, I urge you to think twice before reading this post. I don't want you to gain validation on negativity or give you a new angle to hate yourself from.* This is going to be a long post. Bear with me - I felt like this is a safe space for me to talk about this. I've been subscribed to this subreddit on an alt for a year now, but I rarely contribute or even lurk. It has been a while since I stopped searching for solutions and just accepted that I've been dealt a bad hand. I have the habit of bringing my dinner plate to my desk and watching something while I eat. As I was doing so today, for some reason, I searched the terms "Joe Biden Stuttering". I had known that Biden has a stutter, but having not watched him speak I wanted to know how bad it was. The first video was a clip from CNN, where someone in the audience asked Biden about stuttering. I related to a lot of what he said, but didn't really react to it. It was more of a "Cool, he understands" and a shrug. However, there were some things he said that made me fight back tears. He said towards the end that you can never insult someone using something that is true about them. I didn't quite agree with the phrasing, but I got sentimental over the spirit of it. Those of us who stutter cannot control it. It takes a lot of dedication, practice and a fucking thick skin to be able to manage it. I had never seen it this way before. YouTube then recommended another video to me, where Biden then met a young kid who stutters. This is where I choked up. He told the kid "It's ok". In all my time, I had never heard the words from anyone in my life, and I have a pretty ok life. It hurt me a lot to hear this stranger tell this young kid "It's ok" and "It doesn't define you" over and over again, just to emphasize the fact. I have not even received such reassurance from my own parents. I am a South Asian guy. I remember a lot from my childhood - memories that my parents would say I was too young to have remembered even. I simply cannot recall a time when I spoke without a stutter. My parents were not great with dealing with the problem. For the most part, my mom would just talk to me as if I had no stutter and I appreciated that. However, I could see the annoyance in her eyes sometimes. Especially if I stuttered in front of her friends or relatives. For her part, she has, once or twice, asked me to try doing speech exercises but I knew they don't work for me. She didn't insist on it. My dad on the other hand... Well, despite the many other flaws my parents have that makes me never want to have a kid so that those traits don't trickle down to me as a parent, I still love them. They are not bad people, and we have had a lot of good moments as well. However, the way my father dealt with it - no one should ever have to go through that from a parent. He thought he was helping, but went about doing so in the worst way possible. I remember once I was on the phone, asking if he could pick me up after school. He worked at a building a 5-minute walk away from my school. I stuttered when I spoke and he got angry and lashed out at me for stuttering. He thought he was disciplining me. This was after a long period of lots and lots of negative lectures from him, and he was frustrated that I was still stuttering. He would regularly berate me for not improving. He would constantly shove speech exercises down my throat and if I ever missed out on doing on, I would get a long lecture about how my life would amount to nothing if I kept on stuttering. When I stuttered in front of relatives, he would make excuses on my behalf. Both my parents were often ashamed when I stuttered in front of relatives, as if I had brought dishonor upon them. To this day, my dad regularly points out that I am stuttering and that it is a bad thing whenever I am on the phone with him. One of my biggest desires in life is to tell my dad "Will you fucking shut up about stuttering?". The silver lining was, I grew a thick skin from it. When I was criticized or ridiculed by teachers and classmates, despite being hurt, I was able to develop an attitude of not caring about what they had to say about it. Stuttering was one of the major players that wrecked my self-esteem as I grew. I am not a good-looker, I had buck-teeth, I was awful at sports despite being healthy, and I was an average student. I had nothing going on for me, and to this day, I go back to that place of darkness on a bad day sometimes. There was something weird about the way I stuttered though. One of the things my dad did to improve self-confidence for me and my sister was enroll us in a theater course for kids. I took to theater like a fly to honey. To this day, I can play any character without stuttering a single word. No matter who the crowd is, and no matter how they react. The crowd could throw eggs at me and I wouldn't stutter. There was something about a stage. I never pursued theater. I was not allowed to, and I ended up not doing it once I was an adult as well. I did however, become good at speaking in public. I realized that it was conversations that I had difficulty with - not speaking in general. I remember my English teacher in middle school looking at me like I was from another planet when I delivered a speech about Tutankhamun in class. I delivered a bloody good speech. The content was above average, but I was fluent. She was stunned to learn that I could talk like a normal human being. I was amused internally looking at her sitting at the back of the class, unable to wrap her head around this. When I was performing, I do not stutter. I get nervous sometimes, but I don't stutter. Because no one is responding back. The Dalai Lama could be in the audience frowning at my performance, and I would not stutter. Years and years of developing a thick skin had brought me here. I then developed a mechanism. When I spoke to people that I would not meet often, I adopted a different persona. This persona would have a different attitude, different verbal inflection, different style of speech and would actually look confident. And it worked. I also tended to stutter more in my Mother Tongue than in English, despite being equally fluent in both. It still works for the most part today. The problem is, I leaned too heavily on this mechanism that I am not exhausted of it and feel like I am fake towards the people I interact with. Earlier this year, there was a job fair at my University and I went in prepared. I had no clue what networking was and did not like talking to new people, but I found a recruiter standing by himself and asked him about his company. When I saw that he was eager to tell me about his company, I turned my "charm" on. I looked him in the eye, I smiled, and I spoke like a different person. I even had an accent. Later that session, I met the same recruiter again, this time with a group of students. The recruiter did not have any positions for our major, but he still wanted to talk to us about the general job search process. At one point, I asked him what non-technical skills one should have. In front of everyone he told me, loud and clear, "I don't think you need to worry about that, my friend. There is nothing for me to add. I will mention a few things for the benefit of the group though.". I cannot tell you how incredibly happy I was that day. Short lived, though. I knew the person who spoke to the recruiter was not me, and while I could keep that person turned on, I would get increasingly exhausted having to maintain that act. I went through job interviews the same way. I adopted false personas, each time making it closer to myself, and I never stuttered. When I got nervous, I even did the Micheal Scott thing where I would start a sentence and say garbage fillers without knowing what I was doing, but I did not stutter. I tried to introspect on this annoying, but interesting phenomenon. Throughout all my ears, I had no confidence at all. I never made lasting friends after high school. I preferred people who made friends with me, and now I have no friends. I have no sex life at all, because I'm terrified of talking to women. I know and understand that the vast majority of people would readily overlook my stutter, but having had bad experiences with women, and even after realizing that most women are probably not like them, the anxiety and mental trauma remain. It is one thing to be ugly, but to be ugly and stutter is like walking around with a board that say "0 confidence". Stuttering is not perceived as a 'cute' trait in the majority of us, despite being told otherwise. I never show it. I do talk to them in class, or when I have to ask someone for help. But I cannot have a casual human conversation. I have been unable to make a single female friend all my life. Whenever I mention this anonymously online, people think I am a creep and that I just want to get into their pants. Sure, I am a young man who would like to have sex, but now, more than that, I'd really prefer their friendship. There are some things that male friendships do not offer. Anyway, at this stage, my confidence levels are so low that I cannot even make male friends. And it looks like people can sense that. I take a hard look at myself and realized that I wouldn't try and make friends with myself. Despite all this, there have been good stretches. I do not know what exactly I did to achieve verbal fluency, but I remember the stretches. I remember radiating confidence just because I could talk like a normal person. I immediately judge people the moment they make the slightest bit of fun about my speech. My attitude is callous these days. I have accepted that people have to tolerate my stutter when they speak to me, but if someone is unable to tolerate it, I end the conversation. It doesn't matter who they are. It could be a judge about to serve me a life sentence, and if they said, "Will you be finishing your sentence sometime today?", I would flip them off and spend my life behind bars. I also value those who are close to me and haven't made a single mention about it ever, even during times I stutter really bad that I just say fuck it, and stop speaking. These are people who have even jumped to my defense when someone else insults me, without pitying me. I would not go so far as to say stuttering has destroyed my life. The way I dealt with it has contributed a lot to it. I decided that it is better to listen than to speak, and people now say I am a good listener. I decided to speak only if I had something of value to add to the conversation, and it works in professional settings where it perceived as thoughtful and measured. But I end up repelling most people after the third "How come you are so quiet?" in social situations. When I really have to not stutter, I have to pretend to be someone else. Fake it till you make it works, but I hate having to pretend to be someone I am not. I am cold, callous, nihilistic, riddled with anxiety and depression, and unskilled. I have to really pretend in order to not come across that way, and I hate it. Despite all of this - I am confident in the fact that I won't let this keep me down in life. As much as people saying otherwise, I have missed out on good opportunities because of being judged for my stutter. If one door is shut, I am going to keep walking to another door. As much as I would like to get rid of it, I am ok speaking the way I speak. This is who I am. I stutter.