At the end of the day, you just have to learn to accept yourself. This is coming from someone who still suffers with the same things you do and for the longest time (and still now) is fairly pessimistic about the world. One of my old posts on this sub was about people saying "*blah blah blah* have confidence *blah blah blah*" and how it was all a sham. I still believe it to be a sham, the thing isn't about confidence, but about being brave. We don't tell each other to be brave because it sounds horribly overdramatic for what we are actually doing (talking) but that's what you have to do, is just be brave. I'm not going to spew platitudes at you and tell you everything is going to be alright or that you won't miss opportunities in life because you stutter because you absolutely will if you let it get the best of you. But at the same time we also have opportunities that other people won't get either, and at the end of the day that's what you should be thinking about. Not how stuttering made your life worse, but the unique perspective and empathy you innately for others have because you stutter and know what feeling like shit is like. The thing that worked for me is spite. Human beings absolutely love doing things out of spite, it is genuinely one of the biggest motivators we have. So if your stutter is telling you that you can't/shouldn't do something, then you **ABSOLUTELY** should do it. A story that really connected with me was the myth of Sisyphus and how he pushed the boulder up the hill everyday, only for it to fall. That's what stuttering felt like to me. Yet it took one sentence to recontextualize Sisyphus's situation, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy" By living a live with something as absurd as a stutter, or pushing a boulder everyday up a hill, the only way to live with yourself is to laugh it off and smile because that's exactly how you "win", by not letting it get to you no matter how bad it gets, and ultimately earn how to be less self-aware, that is what truly kills us stutterers,