>Directed towards those who have adapted the mindset of not giving a fuck and if your going to stutter, so what. It is who you are. I ask again, HOW DID YOU DO IT? My desire to express myself and get things done exceeded my desire to project an image of 'normalcy'. It's probably not something you can teach or just work toward. It's something that happens to people as they grow older. That's where all the 'it gets better with age' stuff comes in. We stop giving a shit about some arbitrary social standard of 'cool' or 'normal'. We just want to get stuff done. When you reach that point, it's a huge weight lifted. I wish I could give a more helpful comment than this, something you can set a goal to work toward, but I really do feel deep down this is an organic shift within ourselves that probably can't be forced. However, I do feel like stepping out of my comfort zones was a huge catalyst to getting there. So I will respond to your other points: >At what point did you just decide that enough was enough, that it was time to stop fighting and start living? Did you reach your breaking point? Was it something going on in your life? In your career? Did it just take one person to make you realize that things need to change? This was a purely cumulative effect. It's no single thing. It's years and years of remaining silent and feeling constant dread and anxiety, awful scars in my mouth from my biting tic, emptying my bladder every couple hours just in case I need to speak and might lose bladder control again. And it's not like a switch that gets flipped either from 'isolated quiet stutterer' to 'assertive speaker'. It's just something you do in small steps, by shedding your avoidances. Start with the most minor avoidances. For example, I'd never say, "Turn off the light," because the "T" sound is hard to say. Instead I say, "Switch off the light." A small step is to, every day, when you have the energy, say something you'd otherwise find a substitution for. Do that for a few weeks, even for a few months, then step up your game a bit. Make it twice a day. Then confront speaking situations you'd avoid, and make a choice to say something instead. It's just small steps. I'm essentially training myself, all over again. It's a process I reckon I'll be engaged in for a long time, maybe even forever. Not training myself to speak fluently, but instead, training myself to speak freely, even if I stutter. My desire to reach *that* goal exceeds my anxiety of being seen as 'someone talking weird'. >I hear all the time from people that as you get older, people don’t pay attention to your stutter Completely untrue, and I've never seen this said. A stutter is impossible to just never notice. I think we need to be realistic here. We fucking talk weird. People will notice that. They will not understand it, even if they claim to know a stutterer. Every stutterer is different. I favor repetition and elongation. If my sister met a block-stutterer, she'd be like, "Hm, is that person okay?" This is the point where you have to ask, "So what?" So people will make faces or not understand what's happening. So they will try to finish your sentences. So they will assume you're having a stroke. So what? None of this is bad intent or malicious. This is just garden-variety ignorance. You can choose to educate them, or you can choose to let it pass. Focus on the things you have control over. You can't control your stutter. You can't control peoples' reactions to it. You can control how you choose to deal with them. >When I asked them why, they said the electronics department had been filled. Filled? How? That is what I was interviewing for. I know it was because of my stutter. They figured as a cart pusher I wouldn’t be talking much anyway and couldn’t do the communication to be in electronics. That is total bullshit! How do you truly know, though? Are you sure you're not projecting? Nothing in that anecdote made it clear they'd dismissed you because of your stutter. And if they had, then it was your job to advocate yourself. Your other anecdotes are just the same. We have to stand up for ourselves. That is not a stutterer-specific issue, all told. >You can’t tell me people don’t care about your stutter as you get older. People care *less* and in different *ways*. If you've interpreted this advice as meaning, "You will one day live a life where you will speak strangely but no one will ever react to it," then that's silliness. I can't speak for everyone, but when I say, "People don't care as much when you're older," I'm meaning, "You know that eight hours you spent sweating and hyperventilating over the thought of making that phone call? The person on the other end isn't going to react nearly as bad as your anxiety is telling you they will. They are doing their jobs. You are only a blip on the radar of their life. It means very little to them. They just want to get it over with as much as you do." And more often than not, this is completely true.