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University presentation I’m 20 yo and I have a stutter since I was young (my parents said i wasn’t born with it, it started after being bullied in elementary school) I was diagnosed with social anxiety at the age of 12, i started to see a therapist and in a year my situation improved a lot (thanjs to her my speech became so much fluid). Then i moved to a whole different country and i had the same problem over again (i was 13). again, i started to see a therapist but this time, it didn’t work so well as the first time. From the age of 13 to 18 i couldn’t speak at ALL and i had a severe depression bc of that (I’ve stopped seeing my therapist at the age of 18 bc nothing changed and my parents said it was a “waste of money”) I was able to have one on one conversation without struggling but when i have to talk with strangers or a crowd, i couldn’t speak. Strangely with covid i feel like things were getting better. I wasn’t scared anymore to talk to strangers, now i work on a fast food where i have to speak to people on a daily basis and i don’t have a lot of problems. I still struggle with it when i’m stressed, tired, or when i’m feeling anxious or when i have to talk about something important. Sometimes it’s random but i was kinda okay with it. Last year i didn’t have a lot of problems with uni presentations since it was on zoom so it just felt like i was talking to myself. But this year, i feel like i’ve started to struggle like when i was on high school. I had a presentation two months ago, i didn’t go and i’m going to fail the course bc of that. i had another presentation last week and i wasn’t stressed at all, i was repeating myself that everything is going to be okay, “i just have to breath and speak slowly”. But it went really bad, i could say a word and i started to say random sounds (and since french it’s not my native language, i started to panic and i started to talk with an Italian accent). People started to laugh and i wanted to cry. the presentation went really bad and since that day my self esteem dropped a lot. i have another presentation in two days and i don’t want to live the same thing all over again, so i’m thinking about dropping out. i needed to vent with someone, that’s why i came here. I tried to talk about it with some close friends but they don’t know how it feels to have a speech disorder so they kinda brushed it off. I can’t even talk about it with my parents, they never understood me and they always thought that i’m not trying hard enough. i feel so hopeless.