Hi! I just found this subreddit, I’ve never seen so many people like me who stutter and have to deal with it. Most people don’t understand what it can be like, how utterly exhausting it is to interact with people. I’m in my thirties now, and I’ve stuttered my entire life. Sometimes it still gets me frustrated, but I learned one very important thing in speech therapy, and that was confidence. I doubt you stutter as badly as the anxiety and frustration makes it, which means if you work instead of trying to talk fluently to be proud of yourself and create personal goals that you meet, the embarrassment and anxiety that confines you might ease up a little. I don’t know if that’s helpful to you, but it was a very eye opening experience for me. One other thing. I had a really amazing speech therapist, and while he didn’t “cure” me, something that we did during lessons helped to make the exercises translate to outside of the sessions. He would assign me homework, which including cold calling places like a restaurant and using the techniques to face my fear of talking to people in real life. And then other things like making myself go into a store and asking for directions, using what I’d learned. It takes a while, like building a muscle it can be painful at the start, but it really worked for me. I know how it can seem fine in the session but I think using it in real life is important. Also, if you have a friend or family member who you can “practice” with for half an hour once a week or something, reading or just talking, without trying to hide the stutter or use secondary techniques to avoid it. Facing it is the hardest but most beneficial thing. I live a very positive and productive life, with friends who know I stutter, I run a restaurant and interact with a lot of people every day. Just want to know that you can overcome the socially crippling aspect of it. If I could, you can too, believe me.