postr/StutterFebruary 6, 2016

I never want to talk to anyone

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I never want to talk to anyone I don’t really know where to begin this so I will just start from childhood. I have been stuttering since I was about ten years old. Growing up, this gave me huge problems in school, mainly when I had to do presentations and read out loud. This gave me massive anxiety and I was always trying to get out of doing it. Which pretty much ruined my grades. But socially I never really had much problems speaking. I was pretty much the most social stutterer in the world as long as I was not nervous. By the time I got to high school my fluency had gotten to an all-time high and I was the happiest I had ever been. But I had completely neglected my school work because of my speech impairment. After one year of going to school with the only motive being to hang out with my friends I decided to drop out. Which was awesome for the first six months. I was able to sleep till noon and then hang out with my buddies after they got done with school and still have time to play video games all night. But as time went by I started seeing my friends less frequently. After a year of being unemployed i had almost completely isolated myself. I had lost all contact with my friends and I barely ever spoke to my family. All my interactions at this time where by text over the internet. During this time I also had to cook all my own food, and as you might imagine the only thing a lazy teenager would ever cook is either noodles or microwave pizza. Another year went by and I noticed that I had put on a bit of weight, so I went to the bathroom and wipped out the scale to weigh myself. I did not expect to weigh as much as I did, 105 KG! (OR 230 pounds) So I made the first good decision in two years and immediately went on a diet. I started eating healthy and exercising daily. The first week was pure agony but at the start of the second week I started to get used to it. Another week later and I started to love it. I finally started to feel good, not just physically but mentally too, this was when I realized that I had been depressed for these last two years. Losing weight was a breeze for me, For the first time in my life had I been good at something that people said is hard. In 4 months I had reached my goal of 80 KG and stopped trying to lose weight. I kept eating healthy and exercising, I even started to get in touch with some of my old friends. This is what being happy really feels like. However during my isolation I had barely spoken at all and my stutter had gotten out of control. I used to be able to hold a conversation fairly easily with minor stuttering, but now I stuttered on almost every single word (imagine the opening scene in the kings speech) I also started seeing a speech therapist at this time but the improvements have been small and taken a long time. But the worst side effect of the isolation is that I had completely forgotten how to be social. My entire life I had always known exactly what to say to people, but not been able to do it. Now I was unable to both think about what to say on top of actually saying it. Up to this point I had always been pretty active on internet forums. The internet was the one place where I could say whatever I wanted without having to fear my speech. But for some reason I started to lose interest in talking over the internet. I even lost interest in talking to people in real life too. Even with my stutter I used to be the biggest attention whore ever, but I slowly became more and more introverted and wanted to stay away from the spotlight as much as possible. This was about three years ago. Since then I have only posted two times on public forums and both those times where about tech problems. This sort of behavior has also spread to my real world life. Every time someone initiates a conversation with me I always try to subconsciously get out of it. If it is an acutance, coworker, school mate or just some salesman in a store I always get so nervous because of my stutter. And at home with my family I am just too tired to care. It has even gotten to that point that whenever I get a text message, instead of getting excited about it and being happy about someone wanting to talk to me. I almost makes me annoyed at it and it just feels like a chore to reply. I was texting this girl a while ago, even though we were both clearly interested in each other I just could not be bothered to reply half the time and she eventually lost interest. This last year and a half my depression has slowly started to come back and my anxiety has gotten much worse. I am able to keep my depression in check if I just eat well, exercise and sleep enough. But my anxiety has gotten out of control which has also made my stuttering way worse. The reason I am writing this is mainly to motivate myself to work on both my speech and anxiety. I am also going to try to post stuff regularly on the internet from now on. If anyone actually managed to read all of this, please leave a comment It would really mean a lot to me.

Themes

Anticipation & AvoidanceCauses & VariabilityEmotional Experience

Subthemes

Avoidance & SubstitutionHiding & ConcealmentOverthinking & MonitoringTrauma & PsychologicalAnxiety & Social JudgmentSadness & Hopelessness