That sounds a lot like how my impediment functions. My finely tuned strategies for speaking smoothly will purr along nicely, sometimes for weeks or months without me having to consciously think about them — once even for several years — then suddenly I'll need to say something super basic and I can't get out the most simple of words. Sometimes it takes me a weekend sometimes several months to get my system working again. I've been writing about my life, with the recurring thread of stuttering that's passed through it, at [Radio Free Me](http://radiofree.me/index) — I describe a time when this sort of stumble hit me particularly badly [in this piece here.](http://radiofree.me/2014/02/11/making-magic-part-6/) Short version of the story: Don't hate yourself. It only gets in the way of recovery.