It's really starting to have an effect on my quality of life.

It's really starting to have an effect on my quality of life. Warning, incoming vent about quality of life: I should start by saying that I am 26 and have had a stutter since I was 5. So I have had it for quite a while and figured out how to manage it (see: silence) but yesterday, I really noticed how much it is affecting my life. Because if my stutter, I usually pass up every opportunity to network with people, but when I am forced into it, I will usually struggle with saying my name and if they look at me weird, I just find the next opportunity to duck away. So I have found that avoiding opportunities where is can stammer is effective at decreasing my stress levels, but yesterday was different. My dad who really wishes that I would try harder to find a new line of work set up a chance to meet some guy who was really well known in the scientific computing world and really wanted me to go meet him. I would usually avoid situations like this entirely or brush off opportunities to talk to people because of the debilitating stress that wondering if I would stammer on my name would cause, but this time it was different. I could sense the desperation of my dad, him wishing that I would try harder and at least attempt to meet him and I knew that this must have been really hard for him to set up. So I said sure, I'll see him. Now I was genuinely interested in talking to someone who who was in this field, and I really wanted to ask him questions regarding computation in the past and about the culture and how it has changed over time. I was thinking, ok this should be fine. I read up on some articles that he wrote, had a list of things that I wanted to ask him, and the I went off to meet him. Everything went fine, I stuttered a little on my name and informed him that I had a stutter and he said it's fine, usually by now when I tell people I have a stutter, the conversation goes much more fluently because a lot of stress is alleviated, but this conversation... I don't think I have stuttered more in my whole life then during this conversation. I hard stopped at what felt like every other word, and would clench my jaw during the hard stops making it extremely obvious that I was stuttering and out of 20 minutes, I think there was only one completely fluent sentence. It was long and tortured and at the end he said he didn't understand the point of the conversation or whether or not he was supposed to be giving me advice, but he just shook my hand and walked away. I never got the chance to ask him any of the questions I had. And I don't know why but after that moment, I was devastated. I am used to the disappointment of not being able to have normal fluent conversations with people. When I was younger I would become incredibly distressed at not being able to banter with my peers, but not anymore. This time though, I had a once in a lifetime opportunity to actually talk to someone who I would usually just read papers about, and all I do is sit there and hard-stop on every other word and bite the inside of my mouth because of the clenching. I tasted blood partway through, that was a new one. And I don't know why I feel like I have to write this, but this was the first time I willfully attempted to network, and I wasn't even able to ask him a single question. All I could do was watch him and his attitude turn from curiosity to pity. As I am getting older, I am realizing how important networking is, and how I will be more disadvantaged as I thought I was because of my inability to effectively network​. I feel physically ill.