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Stuttering and the boy named Sue Want to tell you all a perspective I have on stuttering that I learned from a song by Johnny Cash. The story starts out with the birth of a boy. Hes father left his mother before he was born, and for some reason decided to name him Sue, which is a girls name. The father was a quite aggressive man and so his name became Sue. Through his entire childhood he was bullied for having a girls name. He always had to fight off bullies, handle harassment and had few friends. He hated his father for naming him Sue and swore that if he ever met him some day he would kill him. As a 20 something man, he by random chance actually find his father at a bar. He goes up to the man and say "My name is Sue, how do you do, now you gonna die". A fight ensures, the father is a tough man, but Sue has had a hard childhood so he knows how to handle himself. Eventually Sue has a knife to the fathers throat. Suddenly the father smiled and says "this world is a tough place and I knew I would not be there for you, so I gave you the name Sue to make you get tough or die. Its that name that made you strong. You have the right to kill me now, but you ought to thank me first, because im the one that made you tough." Sue gets all choked up, hugs happen and he walks out there with a different point of view. And he thinks that if he ever have a son he is gonna call him "Bill or Joe or any damn thing but Sue". The reference to stuttering is pretty obvious, replace the name Sue with stuttering and i think you have the pretty much same scenario. Dont think this goes for covert stutterers, but for "my kind" of stuttering I think its a really nice way to think about it. Not 100% sure but I also think the "get hard or die trying" is somewhat relevant, as I rarely meet stutterers that have "average" good social skills. They are either really cool guys or very shy guys. As a stutter I have extremely good practice in pushing myself through stressful situation like presentations, its very rare that I let stress "get to me" in everyday situations. You also have to stop caring about what other people think about you. I have no problem going to the store in a thermo suit or making a fool out of myself at parties. All in all, I think that the positive sides of stuttering sometimes get ignored. I dont think the total sum of stuttering is "good", but we are definitively better at some things than "normal people".