I was super insecure and constantly embarrassed and traumatized about stuttering as a kid, but I was a little bit more confident by the time I got to high school because I found myself in a really solid and supportive friend group of full of misfits. That also made dating at that age a bit easier because I would end up in relationships with friends or friends-of-friends who already knew or quickly figured out that I stuttered. I was also kind of wily and tried to craft ways to avoid difficult speaking situations. Most of my teachers were okay with giving me alternate assignments or letting me do one-on-one presentations rather than speaking in front of the class, but eventually just to avoid that altogether I did dual enrollment at a community college during my junior and senior years so I could get preemptive college credits AND avoid giving presentations--because the classes were online at a time before video conferencing had taken off. This also meant that I avoided giving certain presentations once I got to college, because I went to art school and most of those gen-ed requirements were already taken care of. College wasn't entirely stress-free when it came to stuttering, but because most of my classes were studio art and science classes there were relatively few oral presentations. And when there were, I sort of just suffered through them with the support of a very small cohort or made my projects ABOUT stuttering to go full exposure therapy (and in the case of my senior thesis, I dedicated an entire year to a large project about stuttering, which was ultimately very meaningful and rewarding). I've always felt the need to over-compensate a bit because I'm 4'11" and people often read me as being younger than I am (I think that's finally changing thankfully, there are some aspects of aging that I don't love but it's nice being correctly interpreted as an adult). So the combination of being female, being very petite, and stuttering gave me wicked small dog syndrome, I started pretending to be kind of an exaggerated overly-confident caricature of myself sometimes, and by the time I was like 22 I was better at believing myself as that character, which made it a lot easier to navigate the world fluently. I absolutely still stutter but it's different than it used to be, especially in public. It's a bit hard to explain, but nowadays I stutter almost exclusively in one-on-one conversations with the people I'm closest to, through a combination of this exaggerated public-facing version of myself and crafty avoidance of certain situations. I work in a very niche industry, so my professional experience has perhaps been unique, and I haven't felt that stuttering affected it very much. I encountered some shitty people and difficult scenarios when I worked in food and retail jobs as a teen, but once I was in my career any discrimination I faced was mostly age or gender related (which isn't better, it's just not relevant to this sub haha). As I mentioned earlier, relationships haven't really been an issue. By the time I was dating as an adult, people didn't seem to have a problem with it, or if they did I gently educated them or put them in their place depending on what the situation called for. I've been with my husband for 8 years total, 3 married. Much like when I was younger, we met through friends. Also much like when I was younger, most of my friends are nonjudgmental underdogs.