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True off my chest I was talking to my therapist about something my deepest fears and then wham, I couldn’t breathe, I felt like I was gonna faint. I broke out in a cold sweat and the room started swimming. I started laughing to maybe get over it, but when that didn’t work I started to think “am I having a heart attack?” Then I started trying to pace my breathing to see if that helped. Then I realized what was happening and even though I knew what it was, I couldn’t stop it. Tears sprang to my eyes and I was crying. My therapist was pretty calm but I could see she was very concerned. I am the most positive, ebullient person and I rarely feel truly down. But I just felt like the walls were closing in. I’m going to graduate soon and be on a new clinical role. I want to join the military. I will be moving to a new duty station, maybe even a deployment. I won’t have the safety of my excellent school. Most of all, and I won’t be in an environment where the only thing that matters is effort. I’m going to meet a ton of crazy people and idk if I have the tools to deal with them. It was 10 mins before the session ended and so once I felt better I had to leave. When I came home I tried to parse it with my husband. His response was basically that I just had to accept that I stutter. Like stuttering is a neurological variant and is normal. I just shut down. I remember when I was kid. I thought I was pretty cool. I was smart, I was a fast runner (this mattered a lot as a child). I was generous and kind. But one day I overheard some girls talking about me. They were confused as to who was being talked about and one girl said, “howtobegoodagain, the girl who stammers” and everyone instantly knew which girl I was. That shit hurt me so much. I was defined by the thing I hated the most. That day I said I was going to stop stammering no matter what and I mostly did. I have nearly 95% fluency most of the time. To ask me to accept stuttering as my main defining character is to negate decades of hard work, not to mention, reopen the door to ridicule. People say, no one cares, they do. There’s a man in my class, just this month who my friend was telling me about. She said... “that guy, his name is ——-, the one who stammers”. I was like “Yo, I stammer!” And she said, “not like him, he freaks out and shakes, it’s bad! He is the weirdest guy! I think it’s because he stammers....he’s weird.” I felt sad. Because my friend is typically very kind and non-judgy, but she noticed this dudes stutter and I think it affected how she viewed him. Stuttering is almost never perceived as something positive. Anyway, I hard a heart to heart with my husband after being held for a good long while and cried a bunch and got it off my chest. There’s not a lot of people I can talk to about stuttering. Sometimes I get these big feelings that I don’t know what words to use to express them and I can’t really talk about them. But yesterday I made the effort and I talked to my husband and I think maybe for the first time in 7 years he got it. I’m proud of him and myself.