Expanding on this- the pain you feel doesn’t and has never come from a stutter itself, has it? Or does it come at night when you replay your day and think of all the opportunities you wanted to say what you really meant, but decided to hold back, or the anxiety you felt inside of you as you thought of the infinite outcomes that could happen when you stutter- but when you face theses experiences the outcome is never as bad as you imagined, but worst of all for me was I was not being my authentic true self, and it took me to a very dark place for a while. You cannot reasonably expect that when you start your day and go out into the world, only the things you will experience that day are the things you’re comfortable with, it just never happens. And in the same way you do yourself no good expecting the very worst to happen when you go out, it’s a cycle and it seems like it has no end. Overthinking, projecting, constantly being in your head- all the things that go with stuttering; only deal damage, and it usually goes unnoticed until you see self confidence or even relationships being damaged because of it. But it’s not being damaged bacause of your inherent stutter, it’s the way you perceive your stutter and whether you make it control your life your not. It’s probably not going away, that’s ok, I’m 18 and content with that, but I can change my mindset. 4 months ago I was allowing my stutter to eat me alive, I wasn’t doing anything about my stutter, and my mental health was progressively getting worse. Today, my stutter may not have gotten any better, but it’s not holding me back, and I’m a genuinely happy person now. Now what did I have to do to do that? Retrain my brain from months and years of bad experiences. I would block on the first vowel of my name with new people and it made me scared of my stutter, because that’s what bad experiences do. So I proceeded to meet as many people, retrain my brain to not react to stuttering on my name, and I progressively got better. I don’t have many issues saying my name anymore. And is saw a huge change in a short amount of time because I was forcing myself to deal with uncomfortable situations. Your brain is a powerful tool that we cannot fully understand or explain today, but your thoughts and ideas can manifest themselves into real life, and can affect you physically. Let me know if you have any more questions