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Do not pretend you lack choice I went out with a friend a couple years ago. I opened up about my stutter. Along the conversation, I tell him I believed I would be great in sales if I didn't have a stutter. Instead, I worked an office job with minimal interaction. He asked me how I felt about stutter stopping me from living the life I wanted, and then shrieked in anger. You could tell it bothered him, both for me and the ways his own limitations stop him. He didn't have a stutter, but he felt life to be unfair to him too. "How could you not be consumed by bitterness?" - he remarked. I didn't have an answer then. I have an answer now. Bitterness is the easy choice. In the past, I used to order at restaurants based on what was easier to pronounce, not what I wanted to eat. How sad is it to deny your own heart? And for what? I refuse to do that, even if I stutter my ass off. I work in sales now, because I refuse to let my stutter get the best of me. I became my company's best sales agent last quarter, starting just this year and outperforming veterans. I'm not writing this to inspire you, but to make a very clear distinction - there are cowardly stutterers and there are brave stutterers. We've been inflicted with stuttering, but it's not stuttering that takes choice away from us. You choose between bravery and cowardice every single day, and I still have my weak days. Difference is I don't let stuttering justify my cowardice. I'm the coward, and that's because of my choice, not because of stutter. I don't accept my stutter. I refuse it. Each of us has this power. To you who shamelessly cry out here, and especially the adults who are supposed to present strong for impressionable youths, let it be known that we are not the same. I understand your confliction with stutter because of my own, but I do not respect you. IRON TONGUE