Hm, let me put it like this: I think that as we look back on our lives, the way we tend to look for patterns is by starting somewhere in the past and then looking forward instead. This is likely to skew our perspective and make us see all sorts of destiny and fate, so to say. I mean, it's clear that stutter figures in our lives - but it's not clear that we can say we are who we are "_because_" of stutter alone. To put it differently, we are who we are because of *all of it*. But "all of it" is in a general sense just _us_, so there's no surprise there. If it were up to me, I think, the conversation about our personal life would always merely be a display of all those things that we remember and that are significant to us. But instead, we really like to pick out various (attempts at) *explanation* and *meaning*, and that's when we start boiling things down to what caused what. So - to sum up - stutter made me who I am only in terms of me making the stutter what it is. And that's a deliberately circular phrasing. :)