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My stuttering journey I feel like "journey" is a little too cheesy but whatever I've had a stutter since i was about 7. It all started happening around the time my dad died. It was probably a shock or stress related thing, but I don't recall having a stutter before that and neither does my family. It started out as some minor blocking but ended up getting progressively worse, for a good chunk of my elementary school years I couldn't even speak in complete sentences. No matter how hard I tried to force the words out and get them past my throat, I'd block and stumble and stutter my way through trying to complete a sentence in less than 20 minutes. I was bullied a lot for it, verbally and physically. And I wasn't really able to speak up about it either, hell I couldn't really speak for anything. I went to several speech therapists that never really did much to help, both school provided and outside of school. They'd teach me all these weird fluency techniques that never really clicked with me. I specifically remember this one technique my elementary school speech therapist taught me by counting individual syllables on my fingers and breaking them up like that. As expected, that didn't really win me any cool points on the playground and if anything made my speech sound more disjointed than it really was. Around 6th or 7th grade I stopped doing speech therapy altogether. My stutter improved slightly since I was 7, but not by much. I still had a lot of trouble speaking in complete sentences and had an even harder time answering questions. I tried my hardest to avoid speaking at all in school because I felt like doing so at all opened myself up to ridicule. Things changed when I met a kid in my 7th grade history class that /also/ had a stutter. Which was fucking wild to me, Ive never met anyone else before that that also had a stutter. And while his wasnt as bad as mine, he never let it hold him back. He had a bad stutter like me, but he would always be talking and participating in class. It was crazy to me seeing this because nobody seemed to give him shit for it. It made me think, is my stutter the barrier between myself and a normal social life or was my great shame of my stutter the barrier? That other kid with the stutter I mentioned earlier, him and I ended up starting a band together with a few of his friends. I signed on to be the rhythm guitarist, he was the bassist, and we had another guitarist, drummer, and singer. However, our singer backed out at the last minute and somebody needed to step up to the plate. And somehow, that ended up being me. That was an absolutely terrifying position for me to be in. Here I am, at this point I can finally speak in full sentences albeit very disjointed, and I'm expected to be the frontman for a band. Why the hell the geniuses I was playing with thought this was a good idea I don't know, but it led to a really confidence boosting discovery for me. I don't stutter when I sing. Like, not at all. I used to sing a lot as a kid, but never really did after the stutter hit. I still remember how emotional the first practice was. For the first time in years, I was verbalizing full sentences through singing. That's when I decided to grab the bull by the horns and try to tackle my stuttering myself. I felt very helpless for a long time. Nobody has been able to help me, I definitely havent been able to help me. But I've found the best way for me to tackle my stutter was to totally immerse myself in all of my fears. Answering questions in school, reading aloud in class, doing my own presentations instead of trying to find a way out of it, socializing, and the biggest thing of all was being able to speak on stage. I've found that by immersing myself into these things I spent so long avoiding, my stutter gradually got more and more manageable. I started to push past my blocks instead of letting them stop my thoughts mid sentence. I let myself stutter. I had to let myself fail in order to build myself back up. And it turned out to be the greatest possible thing I did for myself. Fast forward 10 years later, I'm about to complete my senior year of university as a digital communications major. I've been extremely active in the local music scene for nearly a decade and have been involved in several music project. I started acting and ended up taking on some lead roles for my friends short films. I even started doing some voice acting for little animation projects. All of these things I never would've imagined myself doing. Not because I didnt want to, because as a child I wanted to very VERY badly but thought because of my stutter I'd never be able to. Nowadays, I still have a stutter. It's not nearly as bad as it was, though. When performing I'm able to get in this weird state of mind where I'm perfectly fluent and don't stutter at all. I don't understand it, but I'm glad for it. If you're young, old, or whatever and have a stutter. Just know that it DOES get better with time. I know how awful the paralyzing feeling of not being able to properly verbalize your own thoughts is and how terrible it is feeling like you won't have a normal social life (or normal life at all) because of your stutter. But as long as you persevere and at least try and feign confidence, you'll be okay. Sorry this was a bit longer than I expected it to be, I just wanted to share my experiences.