This was wonderful. I enjoyed your thought journey, particularly these points: The part about the mask actually being on the wrong side is so true. A lot of our defenses are strangely counterproductive. That the stutter itself is the mask. I have often wondered if the stutter serves an unconscious purpose of some kind. Like a mask that tries to protect us but which we don’t really understand. We may think it’s just a mechanical issue caused by genes and other neurological factors, but maybe it runs deeper than that. Maybe we want to make ourself very small and not a threat to anyone, to maintain an attachment to people somehow and prevent us from getting hurt by not putting ourselves out there. The question I’m left with is whether we have a choice in holding up that mask. I feel like a lot of it is instinctual, a deep unconscious mechanism that is hard to break out of. I don’t mean this in regards to stuttering specifically but more generally to our internal defenses and habitual patterns that are formed early in childhood.