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My story and experiences Hi, I am 24 years old and I have been stuttering since I was 6. When I was young (around the age of 7) I started taking private lessons with a support teacher at my school. The lessons involved repeating a selection of difficult sentences continuously for 20 minutes a day. After a few months the school decided that my teacher's time was best spent elsewhere on other students with more "serious" problems and informed my parents that they could no longer offer assistance in regards to my speech impediment. The following year I was accepted into a speech therapy course at a hospital located 1 hour away from where we lived. In order to get to the 4 classes per week my parents had to take turns in leaving work early, pick me up from school at around noon, drive to the train station, travel to the next town and then walk with me for 20 minutes to the hospital. It is something that I will always be thankful for and I am lucky to have such supportive parents who were willing to do that. The course itself lasted 10 months and the people there were very polite and helpful. I learned how to breathe with my stomach rather than my chest, how to relax before speaking and how to slow my speech. After completing the course I was locking up on words far less and had the confidence to slow myself down to finish sentences. It was soon after this that I began doing something I can only explain as "mind repetitions". After every (and I mean EVERY) conversation I had I would repeat that conversation for up to 40 minutes in my head. For example, if a friend called me up to ask what time I was going to visit him I would reply with something like "I am eating lunch now but I will come over soon". Once I was off the telephone I would repeat his question and my answer over, and over, and over, until I got tired or started another conversation. I don't think I fully understood what I was doing at the time but I now believe it was an important part of improving my speech. I had frustrating moments where I could barely say the first word and struggled to complete sentences. Every day I would run to my room afterwards crying and just lay on my bed repeating the word I got stuck on (or the conversation) over and over until I had a headache. It wasn't just the bad moments either. Even today I still have a problem with keeping track of conversations because I sometimes phase out and start subconsciously going over the first part of the conversation until it sounds "right". It is something I grew up doing and will always do. A year after I finished the speech therapy course I stayed at a Ronald McDonald Charity House with my mother for 2 weeks during the school holidays. A Ronald McDonald House is a place where families can stay temporarily while they are patients at nearby hospitals. For 2 weeks I woke up, went to speech therapy, came home and ate dinner, did my homework and went to sleep. The lessons in class were quite similar to what I had done before but with far more emphasis on having conversations with people. I talked with teachers and other students at the hospital and would then talk to other patients when I returned to the house. For homework I had to record myself speaking into a cassette player for my teacher to listen to the next day. After the 2 week stay at the house I returned home and had no idea how much my speech had improved until family friends visited us that evening and were shocked at my progress. For the first time ever I felt like someone normal and couldn't keep quiet with all my stories from the last 2 weeks. I still had a long way to go but with my "mind repetitions" and the skills learned in speech therapy I entered high school with more confidence than I ever had before. However, this did not last long as I began to resent those who had previously bullied (or nagged me) about my stutter. I felt as if these people who had said such hurtful things in the past did not deserve or have the right to talk to me. My teenage years were quite difficult, not because of my fellow students but because teachers continued to bully me in a passive aggressive way and always felt the need to gossip between themselves. I dropped out of high school a few years later after deciding that the school environment was unhealthy and causing unnecessary anxiety that was hindering my speech. I am now 24 years old and only stutter a couple times a month. I converse with friends and family without the anxiety I used to have, I read books to my nephew, and I no longer fear phone calls or public speaking. I am currently studying Bachelor of Languages at University and hope to become an English teacher in the near future and eventually a translator. So who is laughing now? :) Only the closest of friends and family know I stutter and even fewer people know of this story. I apologize if it was too long but hopefully it is interesting enough for someone out there. Thanks for reading!