When I was 9-10, I went to boarding school. I started stuttering a lot more than usual and was very embarrassed about it, especially because it had gotten a lot worse every fast and I was bewildered. I liked reading in class and had been a good reader but I had recently been having some breakdowns. I had one of those teachers who believed that she had to treat me just like everyone else and would insist that I read out loud. This one girl, Maureen, decided that she would start sniggering and laughing every time I stuttered. She also managed to convince a clique of girls to do it along with her. For the first time I started getting real anxiety about reading out loud. My teacher noticed and one day after a particularly bad session of me stuttering and Maureen and her friends laughing, my teacher decided to adress it. She said, " Howtobegoodagain, do you know why you talk like that sometimes?" I said "No." She said "Its because you are super smart and your brain moves so fast, your mouth hasn't time to catch up. My father also talked like that and he is a professor at Cambridge, and I am sure that you are smart enough to be a professor one day. I am sure you will go to Harvard or Cambridge too." Then my friend Benny quipped "Yeah, she has always been very clever, remember you always used to come number 1 all the time?" And my friends who had come to school boarding school with me decided they really liked this explanation and started remembering times since Kindergarten when I had done or said super smart or amazing shit! Maureen tried so hard to be my friend after all that. But she had burned that bridge to the ground. The net result is that people close to me associated my stutter with being smart (with some few exceptions). But this made ***me*** have this idea that I was really smart and it made me work way harder and do much better academically and even just at life, than most other people. I was also very lucky. Hard work + luck= success in many things. Even now my diaper buddies (friends I have had since I was in diapers) always expect me to be the one to make a shit ton of money and make them all rich haha.