Fluency is not the goal. It is a very small portion of the overall goal of "overcoming stuttering". Some insight from a newly-fluent speaker and asking for advice.

Fluency is not the goal. It is a very small portion of the overall goal of "overcoming stuttering". Some insight from a newly-fluent speaker and asking for advice. Hey everyone. I have been speaking fluently since June of this year. I'll go into more details in the rest of the post but it has made me realize how little fluency truly means in the grand scheme of things. I don't feel all that much different compared to how I felt before speech therapy. I'm making this post for two reasons, firstly to possibly help some people who may be fixated in fluency rather than overcoming other issues (or who feel that they'll never make any progress if they are not fluent), and secondly to ask for advice on how to overcome those issues myself. I am M and will be 20 next week. I have stuttered since about kindergarten. I grew up in a relatively small community, I grew up with or at least knew a little bit about pretty much everyone in my graduating class and many people in grades above and below me. I was incredibly fortunate to have an awesome friend group that is still as tight as ever after we all went to different colleges. I think all of this this actually may have put me at even more of a disadvantage at this stage in my life because I did not have to put any effort into socializing and getting to know people, it just kind of happened. I never really dated anyone but had a lot of friends and never felt lonely High school comes and goes and I get a near-full ride at one of the top engineering schools in the region, public university with around 35,000 students, to study Electrical Engineering. I had pretty much "made it". My classes were doing okay, but I was lonely. My roommate and I didn't click. Second semester he moved out and I got a new roommate... who quite literally was only there maybe 10 nights the whole semester. Nobody that I knew super well from HS went to the same college. Sitting down and striking up a conversation with someone sitting next to me was a completely foreign concept to me. I did meet some people, due to having class projects, and being in the poker club, but I can't really say I had made and solid friendships. My close friends from high school go to colleges relatively close to mine so we would hand out every few weeks which is what kept me sane. Sometime in my second semester I started browsing this subreddit and knew I had to make some short of change. My parents and grandmother convinced me to attend HCRI in Virginia. This summer I went there, and they truly did help me achieve fluency. I, for all intents and purposes, don't stutter anymore. When I do start to block I can get out of it very quickly. I felt like I was on top of the world. I've been back at college for about 5 weeks now and that high is wearing off. Turns out, being physically able to speak doesn't automatically make you a social butterfly. Who would've thought? I joined a few more clubs, but they have inexplicably gone silent on social media and as far as I'm aware aren't having any events. I'm friendly with my new apartment mates but again not really clicking. I'm actively forcing myself to talk to random people in classes and such so I physically know a good number of people now but it doesn't seem to go anywhere. We have a "wellness day" today (we had a staggering number of student suicides last year so they give us occasional days off) and I'm sitting here typing a reddit post about how I'm lonely. This post is already ridiculously long so to sum up my thoughts here: physically having fluency isn't going to fix the much deeper issues caused by decades of not talking to people. I am almost completely fluent but still feel like I do not know how to talk to people, how to carry on a conversation, how to build a relationship, and still have social anxiety. I would trade my fluency for the ability to effectively socialize in a heartbeat. So, me message for (particularly younger) stutterers out there: go out and talk to people. Anyone. About anything. Fluency is meaningless if you're afraid to talk to people anyway. You are an extrovert. We know this because you want to be able to talk to people. You want to be charismatic and know people. So, go do it. Don't put all your eggs in the fluency basket. Break the fear and worry about fluency later. And so, my question: how do I actually do that (lol)? How do I go from having never really reached out to anyone, had a chat, to... doing it? It feels so foreign to me, I have no idea where to even begin. My college does not seem to have events that are exclusively for meeting people. They all talk about bringing your friends. I have not seen an event where friends is the goal. I'm really at a loss here. Thank you all for reading, and I don't blame anyone who skipped that outrageously long post.