Thankyou for writing and sharing this, as my younger self would have really appreciated it and felt seen :) Having said that, I do probably count as one those people you write of, who have a mild stutter mainly triggered by anxiety. Having said *that* though, I did go through a period of my life for roughly 12 years where my stutter was severe in all the ways you describe - paralleled by untreated, normalised high levels of anxiety I'd become numb to. (Only difference with you in symptoms is I did not stutter as much when I was alone/with pets/sometimes did not stutter at all in these situations. Obviously I know now this was because anxiety was my main trigger). I am now 25, so 12 years is like half of my life. I did also stutter since early childhood, so I've had the stutter longer than this; but that severe period (where it felt like I was just a "stutter" in social environments and had no identity other than that) lasted roughly 12 years. It only started to improve at 23, and luckily for me as I said, it was/is anxiety. Once I started shaping my life to reduce my anxiety levels and denormalise it, it drastically got better. Plus I am on the spectrum which I discovered around age 22/23, which cleared up a lot of things on the anxiety front with understanding how I work, etc, and also realising sometimes I was just overstimulated/cognitively exhausted (another trigger for my stutter). I say all this to emphasise that while my experience is fundamentally different to yours because my stutter is caused mainly by anxiety, subjectively I did experience something very similar, and because of that, I can empathise with you. For all I knew during those 12 years, my stutter was 'here to stay' and I genuinely didn't expect to *ever* be free of it, even slightly, as over the course of my teenagehood it had only gotten worse and worse, and worse... That's why I found myself tearing up when I read your post, especially when you said how your boss told you he would have given you a promotion if not for your stutter (wtf??!!!), and how you have attempted to end your life before. Even though I never was objectively trapped in that reality as I thought I was, back then when I was a teenager/young adult, it *was* my subjective reality. So I can truly understand how you'd want to get out of it that way. I had suicidal ideation myself and developed depression solely in link with my stutter. If I'd known I was on the spectrum too at the time, I probably would have felt even more cynical. To be disabled communicatively in *two* ways, as you say. It's hysterically unfair. I feel like there's also something cognitively dissonant in having one disability you can mask (I could highly mask my ND), while the other - a stutter - is a disability you can't mask to the same point. Yet both are invisibilised by society (and in my experience, both made me feel incredibly alone). I wanted to say I'm so sorry for everything you have been through because of this. It is no joke. And you're right that people are wrong to play it down. I used to feel like I was the only stutterer where I lived because I never heard anyone else stutter and this was made worse by how in the media, I felt totally unseen. A stutter is not "cute" at all when it's severely impairing to social communication. In any case I take my experience as personal and I always expect that there are people with stutters not caused by anxiety/trauma, like you, for whom it is constant in every environment. But until I read your post, I didn't think how important it is to explicitly acknowledge that when posting on subreddits like this. So I will keep that in mind from now on and I apologise for any pain I might have caused in the past (posting on here) because of that ❤️ Thank you again for raising your voice on here and sharing this. I'm sure many have felt seen by it. I hope it encourages others in the stuttering community who relate even more than i do with your experience to raise their voices too. A disability burdened with silence should not be shrouded in silence in the media too - let alone on a subreddit dedicated to the disability! (Sorry for the long comment..)