Always the same, regardless of how much I can change

Always the same, regardless of how much I can change I can look at how I speak and objectively say, without a single doubt, that the way I speak now is infinitely more fluent than it was in my past. I can do many things I never would have thought possible. People who knew me as a child or a teenager are always so surprised! Is that not great? I should feel good but I do not. It doesn’t matter that sometimes I can look somebody in the eye and say without pause or repetition exactly the words I had hoped. It doesn’t matter that the severity is less. It doesn’t matter because, in the end, I will inevitably falter. I have always felt that there would be one more year or one more improvement and then, one day, I could look back like a cured man on it all. Maybe, one day, I wanted to feel like I could easily pretend I had never been like this at all. The truth is that I still feel the fear straining to leap out of my heart when I am preparing to speak. I still find my voice failing me. I still awkwardly contort every feature of my face into a grotesque mockery. I still endlessly repeat the same sounds. I still get so caught that I cannot breathe. It feels like every success just heightens my anticipation of failure, and it hurts so much more because there was a single moment just before this where that person thought nothing of me. Suddenly, some change washes over them, their eyes change, their entire face softens and is then hardened in one motion, attempting to hide the revulsion and pity and relief (that they are not like this) that is being suppressed. I feel like I have fallen into old habits. My shyness and my ineloquent speech are always at the forefront of my mind. Every decision I make feels like a series of conscious attempts to escape exposing myself. Sometimes, I feel a little bit crushed, slowly suffocated, by the feeling that it will never matter how far I have come or how much I can hide I will never change - on the inside, I am still this very same person who cannot speak and is mocked. Maybe part of it is that there is no reason for me to try so hard, so many years wasted trying to talk like a normal person. I have some kind of inner acceptance (or acceptance of defeat?), I have made a strange peace with not being able to talk in a way that is acceptable to others, but still it is an endless pursuit that I can never quit. I feel some sad ambivalence that comes across as a bit pathetic. I don’t mind what other people think of me but I can’t escape how poorly I think of myself. It’s very odd.