I hear a lot of pain and self awareness in what you wrote, and honestly none of it sounds strange or broken to me. It sounds human. Many people without a stutter live in that same loop of replaying tiny interactions, mind reading others, and assuming the worst. The feelings you are describing are very normal, regardless of fluency. One thing I want to gently challenge is this idea of being “normal.” I do not think you actually want to be normal. Normal is boring, flat, and mostly imaginary. What you are comparing yourself to is not reality. You are comparing the full, unfiltered interior of your mind to the polished, superficial exterior of other people. That is an unfair comparison every single time. You see their calm face, not their anxiety at 2 a.m. You see their behavior, not the noise in their head. If you could hear everyone’s internal monologue, you would be shocked at how similar it is to yours. About the waving example. A person not waving back almost never means what your brain tells you it means. People miss things, are distracted, are tired, are in their own head. Your mind fills the gap with a story about you. That habit is not a stutter problem. It is an anxiety problem that happens to latch onto stuttering because it feels like a concrete explanation. You are also right about something important. Thinking can help sometimes. It can help you avoid situations you truly are not ready for. But when thinking turns into constant rumination, it stops protecting you and starts torturing you. At that point it is no longer problem solving. It is just fear running on a loop. Here is the hard but honest part. Acceptance alone will not change this. You can accept that you are nervous and still decide not to let it run your life. Things only change when you exert force. Not force as in beating yourself up, but force as in action. Small actions. Repeated actions. Doing the thing even while nervous. Letting your brain scream and still moving forward anyway. No insight, no realization, no perfect understanding will replace that. You do not need to stop caring what people think. That is unrealistic. You need to stop obeying every thought that tells you it matters. Those are two very different things. You are not weak for being stuck in this loop. You are not broken. But if you want something different, something has to change in how you respond to those thoughts. You are not failing at being normal. You are just human, sensitive, and stuck in a pattern that can be changed. Slowly, imperfectly, and with effort.