I’m 67 yo. I remember taking a speech class in high school. I gave a speech on mixing drinks and acted like there was really vodka in the bottle and that I was getting drunk. The teacher came over to examine the bottles at the end of the talk, indicating I did a pretty good job of acting. Many students found it amusing. I was scared to death. The teacher gave me an F for citizenship. I don’t know why to this day. I was too afraid to talk to him and explain why I did it since I was still in the closet about my stuttering. I only came out when I was about 25 yo. It’s not easy having a stutter, severe or mild. The mild ones can play big head tricks with you as you think you can pass for normal by doing all sorts of mental gymnastics with words and acting. It’s awful. The real you is hidden. A severe stutter makes communication extremely difficult and the listener must be empathetic, even indulgent. I had a successful career and, eventually, got married. The stutter was something it took me a long time to talk about with any woman. It sucks, period. My wife’s boss, one of the founders and former CEO of Genentech, had a significant stutter and was tremendously successful, as was Jack Welch of GE. And of course there is Joe Biden, who had what appears to be a similar level of stuttering as you. So what do you do? You’ve got to find some way gain a reasonable measure of control over it so that you aren’t simply waiting for the monster to come out, or get worse, or get better — someway that YOU exert control over IT. Speech therapy is the most solid approach. You need to find a program and process that works for you. I went to Hollins Communication in Roanoke Virginia and thought it was real helpful. I did that when I was 25 yo. There were some severe stutterers there and I thought they did better than me at the end, I think in part because they knew they had to stick with the system. In any case, that is one option. But I want to point out that it takes continuous, ongoing work for your entire life, no matter what program you use. It’s a burden you have. It’s fucked up but that’s just the way it is for us. That speaks to the need to get some psychological counseling, too. Stutterers generally have a pretty screwed up self image and story about themselves. You have to address that in order to have reasonable relationships with others, and with life itself. I don’t know what else to say. It sucks to stutter. Communication is such a fundamental part of being human. It is essential to finding connection. Some will find it worthwhile to reach out to you. You probably have the wrong friends in the sense that they don’t really care about you, the real you, but then again you are in high school and pretty much everyone is hiding and playing mind games at that age. Some aren’t, though. Look for them. They are probably considered the odd ones, not as popular or pretty. They will likely be highly successful and very interesting later in life. But I come back to the fact that you have some responsibility to do some work on your end to, as I outlined above.