Practice practice practice!!

Practice practice practice!! Hey guys I’m Noah I’m 20 years old and I’ve been stuttering for as long as I can remember. I’ve had speech therapy during my childhood and also during highschool. I knew all the techniques like easy onset n the rest of that shit yk? So I thought I’d be okay going into highschool. WRONG. Bro everytime I would read out loud in highschool I would have these horrible blocks man. My heart would always be RACING and my breath and voice would be so shaky. After I heard some friends/kids make fun of it in sophomore/freshman year it really destroyed my self confidence almost entirely. During highschool I began to grow more and more anxious ab my stutter and it resulted in me not participating in classes where I needed to speak out loud and it really started to impact my grades. I got through this obstacle and ended up at my first choice college. I would be so terrified to mingle and go to social gatherings where I would have to speak for a decent amount of time. Also I was still terrified to speak in class. I just locked myself in my dorm to have as little social interaction as possible. Which is something I shouldn’t have ever done. It took a toll on my mental state and I was just depressed and miserable as fuck because I had came to the realization that my stutter was actually controlling my life. I’m currently a sophomore now and this semester I’m enrolled in an English class that requires it’s students to have discussions and read out their written works out loud. When I read this on the syllabus on the first day of classes I IMMEDIATELY wanted to drop the class. I was so scared of this shit that I ditched two of my classes where we were supposed to read out stories we wrote the week before. This made me feel like such a weak human being and I knew I needed to make a change. Our teacher assigned us to write stories again and told us that we’d be presenting them on Wednesday (today) I wrote my story on Monday and turned it in early. This gave me two days to practice reading my story as fluently as possible (My class starts at 3:35 pm so I have lots of time to practice.) I called my parents last night and talked with them about how I was feeling and that I was tired of being scared and stressed 24/7 just cuz of my stutter and the social anxiety that stemmed from it. After countless breakdowns and tears and discussions my parents have always been very supportive when it comes to my stutter and they gave me some really good words of encouragement that made me feel way better man. I practiced reading my story out loud to them and I read slowly, used easy onset when necessary, paused when I needed to and sounded out every syllable. I practiced reading this with them for about 2 hours. Today I FaceTimed my dad and I practiced reading to him for about an hour and a half and stopped before class. When I was called on to read my story I remained calm and read with ease, even tho I was still a lil nervous. I felt so accomplished after man I wanted to cry tears of joy LMAO. It’s been AGES since I’ve had genuine confidence while reading out loud. Confidence is key guys. And practice really really helps.