I am new to this forum. Your story is very familiar, probably, to most of us stutterers. Frankly, I never even thought to look for a forum for this until just this week. Here are some thoughts: If there is any opportunity to get involved with a speech pathologist, take it. As an alternative, in most states, if you have a speech disability, the school system has someone on staff that can provide therapy as well. They might not be a pathologist, but you take what you can get. ------------------ Here is the ugly truth from an older adult who had a lot of opportunities handed to him but failed to overcome his stuttering: As others have alluded to, we do not realize how bad our speech is. To us, it is a little stutter. To others, it is difficult to endure just to listen and for any length of time. It wasn't until I was able to record the meetings I ran that I got to hear just how rough my speech cadence could be. Those recordings are incredibly humbling and make me very sad for what I lost because of my stutter. For you, today, it is about high school and socializing. In the future, it will be about a job interview to get into a company. If you get through that, you have to deal with the day to day of stressful situations and handle building coalitions to solve problems and implement solutions. Granted, people are not allowed to discriminate against us for our disability, and it is a disability. But... proving we were discriminated against is next to impossible. Even if we could, hiring counsel costs a lot with no guarantee for winning. I was, eventually, passed over in the military (Navy Officer). That ended my career. Then, in the civilian world, although I got jobs as a mid-level manager, I could not get past that rung. I could not figure out what was wrong with my approach until I got remarried and my wife was listening to me run a meeting from home. She then broke it to me. She said I was just hard to listen to sometimes and could make others in the meeting uncomfortable with my speech patterns. Again, in the corporate world, managers cannot discuss disabilities out loud. They cannot even risk saying it in private to one another-been on that side of things and seen it. But anyone who would have input on a promotion opportunity I might be up for would much rather I not be the person they had to listen to more if they could choose anyone else. So, this is your best chance to get to a better place before the strikes start really counting against you. Do what you must to fight this beast and get it under decent control. While it will always be there, you can get it to a point it never needs to surface in your professional life and as little as possible in your private life. The techniques that are available today are far improved from what I was offered (truly night and day). Today, they can diagnose those speech situations (words, vowels in succession, etc...) that cause us challenges as well as techniques to control our patterns that, in turn, further limits our propensity to stutter. But... we all need help to get just as far down the road of control as we can. We can do a lot alone, but we can do infinitely more with good professional help. Finally, look around you. Everyone is fighting something you have never noticed and this makes all of us in this world equal. Conquering our limitations takes work. When we do it, if we do it, though, can determine our life trajectory. The bottom line here is that it is much, much easier to do it as a young person than as an adult.