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What even is stammering anyway? Hi all, I know it's a bit long but please bear with me. I have never really voiced these questions before, especially not to other stammerers. I wasn't sure how to phrase it, but I hope my intention and meaning is clear. I am a life long stutterer/stammerer. My family picked up on it when I was in nursery (my dad stammers too, though not so obviously these days). I went to children's speech therapy where they told me to talk slowly and practice blowing bubbles and all that (iykyk 😂👌). The responsibility was then handed over to my primary school (4-11) and my speech seemed to have greatly 'improved', though in retrospect the stutter just became covert and I still had the symptoms. My stutter gradually became much more obvious during secondary school (11-16), I suppose my covert strategies were bound to run out of steam some time, until in college (16-18) I could barely complete a Spanish speaking exam or a presentation in the way a fluent student would. At this point I took to the Internet, looking for information on what stammering actually was. I know that I obviously have one, but that is not information to give me context. The teen/adult stammering experience is a relatively rare one, which is little understood even by us ourselves. I can compare my grandmother's experience of stammering, when the solution was akin to punishing it away, to my father's who was given strategies to reduce it, to myself who, during my second speech therapy stint in secondary school, was mainly assisted to accept the presence of my stammer and gain self-confidence when the mild techniques to encourage fluency had little effect. Given that all 3 of us stammer to this day, myself to by far the largest extent, there comes a time when you are 'on you're own' with regard to medical intervention unless you have the time and resources to try obscure herbal remedies and go to intensive fluency and breathing camps which may or may not have any effect. This brings me back to the question I am asking you. What even is stammering anyway? To be clear I say 'stammering' or 'stuttering' because these are the given terms and while I do make stuttered sounds, repetitions and elongations regularly, this is not really the crux of the problem. I also experience blocks over seconds or minutes where no communication is possible at all, as are common among stammerers. The fundamental issue for me is the muscle tightness, tiredness and general discomfort involved in creating words that just do not want to happen. (I'm told that other stammerers experience this physical discomfort to very varying degrees, and I would be interested to hear more about this from anyone who is willing to talk about their own experience.) I am also aware that for some people the true problem of stammering is the anxiety and embarrassment assigned to it. Even if a stammerer does not experience obvious discrimination, they will experience what I can only describe as micro aggressions in everything from displays of frustration at the time it takes to talk to you to the well meaning but heart-breaking 'don't worry darling, you will grow out of it'. Many never do grow out of it, and yet we are made to feel like some theoretical freedom from stammering is the only hope for us. I can see why so much treatment is focused on acceptance, as an attempt to counteract every other message we might have received throughout our lives. When we talk about treating stammering, what is it that we are actually trying to solve? The obvious answer is that we try to achieve fluency, but it feels to me that when this does not work, there is little in the way of a plan B. Plan B for me has been to keep trying to speak through discomfort and tiredness to achieve my goals. I am very lucky to experience very little guilt or shame about my voice being heard, especially these days, but self acceptance has not proven to be the validating solution it might have seemed. I would never tell anyone that they are disabled if they simply do not identify with the label, but personally as I have reflected on my speech and the way it impacts my life, and sometimes speaking is just Hard. And unpleasant. And this makes me avoid some situations like ordering food, meeting new people, and public speaking not because I am anxious, but because its just so tiring. It is strange to me that the solution to having difficulty speaking is to just keep speaking. As I have come to view myself as disabled, other possibilities have come around for me. I now simply write notes to the cashier when ordering food. I make the decision at the beginning of these situations that I shant speak at all unless absolutely necessary, not because I can't, but because I will be so drained by the end that I will literally achieve less in the day than I would have other wise. I am moved to wonder why stammerers never took to more diverse forms of communication as other communities did, like signing. I am not saying we should start by appropriating deaf culture when we are not a part of it, I am saying that solely using speech and trying to shoehorn ourselves into the fluent world is perhaps not the best or only solution for everyone. Is stammering a disability? I don't know. I have reached 19 years of life and realised that I don't know what stammering is and I do it every day. Please tell me your thoughts and what you agree with and disagree with. I have never really voiced these questions to other stammerers before, and I would be very interested to hear your thoughts. 😊