If English isn't your mother tongue, what is?! holy hell haha I was definitely REALLY emo about my stutter for a long time - I was bullied pretty bad on and off until 8th grade, and teachers would sometimes not call on me for entire months on end, etc. Most of the emo-ness came from my love for foreign languages and my childhood dream of being a UN simultaneous interpreter - I don't know why I settled on that - which still sounds cool but I admit would be more trouble as a job than it's worth. Once I got to college, I didn't let my stutter hold me back from almost anything. I ducked out of a last-minute intramural debate tournament my senior year because I'd never debated before and felt both unprepared and terrified - and that's honestly one of the things I'm most ashamed about from my college experience. That I let my fear get the best of me. But apart from that, I was the favorite of our school's Chinese department (despite crying over my awful reading-out-loud abilities and actually going to the school therapist about it for one session - she was like, "but you're speaking fine right now! you have a 98% in the class! what are you worried about?"), I presented at an optional conference run by our school (despite crying a whole bunch both before and after), I translated for a visiting Tibetan film director (I actually have totally forgotten how I spoke at the time, but it was really cool...) etc etc. My stuttering has gotten lighter as my confidence has improved. Some days it's back, really really bad, and professors and people on the street and taxi drivers make fun of me for it cuz they don't get it. But oh well. I can't rearrange my day simply because it's a bad speaking day and I don't want to translate or teach or make a bunch of phone calls. Maybe from that it makes sense what I mean by "ignoring" it? A lot of what I wanted to do really hurt because it stretched my speaking abilities, but I felt like I just had to muscle through it or miss out on the experience. It felt more like being pushed into a split by your ballet teacher than practicing driving. Basically, I'd try to balance how much pain/stress I would probably feel, and how much value I'd get out of the experience. A lot of things, like frequent crowded, noisy parties, didn't make the cut... but I still went out a few times so that I knew what it was like :P I have totally accepted that my failures and limitations are due to that particular thing not being valuable enough for me to spend my time and nerves doing it. I KNOW I can do anything, but some things - like being a simultaneous UN translator - are not worth it. Does that make sense?