Hi! I've been stuttering since I was 3, so I don't remember myself without it. It was pretty bad in primary school, got worse in middle school (got bullied a lot, no one dared to be friends with me for 2 years of middle school), and improved a little with speech therapy in high school. My big heartbreak was that I was great at languages, but I knew I could never be a professional interpreter because even if I got a handle on my stutter, I'd never be able to compete with normal speakers. I still forced myself through French and Chinese classes, despite sometimes getting looked down on by classmates and not called on by teachers. Ended up taking a job teaching English in China - had to speak (often in Chinese) to huge groups, sometimes as many as 300! Definitely hard, and sometimes I stuttered pretty badly or reverted to English, but I've since appeared on a Chinese national tv game show where I had to lie, answering rapid-fire questions in Chinese in front of a live audience! Basically, despite my stutter, I've taught and interpreted and been an active participant in college and grad school classes. I got mocked sometimes, and still do sometimes mostly by Chinese people who don't get what's going on, but I just look extra sad and tell them I have a stutter, and they generally apologize. I don't think I'd have gotten this far if my talent hadn't required me to. If I were actually good at lab work, I'd be locked away in silence, afraid to present at conferences. If I were a great writer, I'd hide behind a computer. But language requires speech... Sometimes I get a little upset that I had to do it "hard mode," but I like Emerson's words: *There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.*