Hi, I just wanna point out that sometimes, often I think, it's kind of mysterious how this kind of dramatic shifts in perspective happens. As you word it "one day I just realized..." So, yeah, *something* happened to cause that shift, but we don't really know what. I do think sometimes forcing yourself to do something can cause a shift -- like those programs where they make you talk to lots of strangers til you're more immune to reactions. But other times it's not really explainable. So, though I don't stutter (a very close friend does, so I read about it a lot), I get frustrated with people saying "you just gotta not let it bother you," etc. NOT saying you're doing that. You're not. You sound like you accept other people's experiences as different from yours. Just wanted to use your answer to sort of point out that even though sometimes people say things like "I just decided not to let my stutter get in my way," they had some kind of epiphany or sudden unexplainable shift before they "decided." Or maybe not so sudden and dramatic, but still....I think something shifted in their I don't know -- being? soul? -- and then other things became possible. Hope this makes sense.