I started stuttering age 11 or 12. Before that I was fluent.  I was in speech therapy when I was five or six years old. But that was because of "s" and "sh" sounds I seem to have had problems with. Many years later I found a study that suggested that putting kids in speech therapy early can be very detrimental, because of the feeling of inadequateness it can provoke in them. As someone with a above average memory, I always found this to be intriguing. Yeah, so 5th grade I still participated in a reading competition, end of 6th grade I couldn't get a word out without stuttering. Several things happened during that time: my father got very sick a few years before, couldn't work. My grandma got a stroke, we cared for her at home. Then my mother started to drink heavily. Coming from school I sometimes found her lying in her piss next to my grandma, stuff like that really did some things to me. In school some bad things happened too. First my stutter wasn't that bad. Then, shortly before summer holidays end of 5th grade, we all told jokes in class. I told one about someone with lepra showing the way or something, stuttered a little because I was so excited  to tell my bad joke. Then the teacher, an evil old woman, started: now I will tell you a joke, about a stutterer and a hunchback...and told that joke to shame me. Man, it worked, I never felt so ashamed.  Fun fact: I started stuttering in German first, about half a year to a year later I also started stuttering in English. I took French in 7th grade, half a year - zero stuttering...then it started there also. Haha, don't ask me what my brain is doing, it's crazy... Well, now I'm 50 years old. I was singer/shouter in a Hardcore band for many years, made party, studied, didn't give a fuck about many things, drank and drugged, etc. etc. Then I started a computer games company with an old friend, aged 35, and now we can live of it. I had to suddenly use the phone (didn't have mobile phone until 2010, god I hated phones so much), talk to people and so on. And I just did. Told them before we talked something like "listen, I get stuck sometimes. It's just how it is" or something like that and just started the conversation. One thing came to me just after proofreading: I remember my teacher in 4th class asking me to stop using the word 'also', a fill word I later used a lot to give me time and take a breath. Just to be clear, I talked fluently back then. Anyway, the brain does crazy things. Best to ignore it as often as you can. :)