I'm afraid it's mostly negative things; at least those are the things we focus on the most, anyways? One word to sum up the negative influence my stutter has on me: limitation. Every single day there are numerous occasions where I avoid speaking or adding something to the conversation, and it just feels like an enormous limitation. As if I'm constantly only running on like 50% of the capacity I KNOW I have in the situation. The way I know I'm missing out on so much potential and capacity in just every day situations is because I have so many things inside my mind to say. So many jokes, anecdotes, stories, compliments, hilarious dialects or impersonations, clever things, answers and so on... I have so many things in my mind and on the tip of my tongue ready to be said - but a lot of it is never spoken. Some of the immediate negative effects are, of course, such things as grades. I'm currently in my senior year of what I guess is the equivalent of advances high school (18 yo from Denmark), and there is no doubt in my mind that my oral grades in pretty much all classes would be several steps higher if I didn't stutter. I don't think a single class passes without me avoiding to contribute something clever or interesting to the discussion or giving the answer to what the teacher is asking for, simply due to my stutter. Luckily, I do really well in school, so despite this handicapping of my grades I will still end with quite a high average etc. the REAL problems are the social ones. I have much to be grateful for. I have amazing, loving parents who I admire and am proud of every day (even though I inherited my stutter from my stuttering father), I am smart and have many intellectual and cultural talents such as language (I am bilingual as of my parents), music and I am quite interested in science as well. I function really well socially (most of the time) and as far as I've been able to tell, I'm liked in my social groups. I have friends and I have some good friends, and I very rarely get comments about my stutter, and they are virtually never rude either. Nobody bullies me, nobody ever has, and no teacher has ever mocked me or the likes. I'm surrounded by understanding people who don't care that I stutter. That's probably the hardest thing in the world for us stutterers to understand: people don't care. On the rather rare occasions that I've actually talked to my near friends about my stutter, I've been so surprised to learn that they don't care or mind at all that I stutter. One of my best friends, the guy that I've known for the longest and with whom I usually can't really have this sort of deep conversation with once said something along the lines to me: "I don't even notice when you stutter anymore. It's just who you are, the way you sound". It really caught me off guard to hear the other end of the spectrum described this way. To us stutterers, or me, at least, disfluency is NOT who we are! Speech filled with repetitions and blocks is not how we sound. We spend so much energy on trying to hide our stutters, and its practically on my mind every single time I speak: "I better focus and hope that I don't stutter so this person won't notice it" etc. We know that stuttering can go away, and so we won't accept it as being part of who we are or who we talk, we don't want to settle for a life of stuttering, because we just want to be like everybody else and speak fluently so we won't get picked on for it. But this friend of mine didn't see it that way at all. A stutterer IS who I am, and it is how I sound, and there is nothing wrong with that at all and nothing to make fun of - that's just how I am to him. I've come to the conclusion that it can be compared to a person who has an accent or a dialect - sure it might catch you off guard or seem funny in the start, but as time passes your brain accustoms to this person's way of speaking and no longer makes an automatic distinction between it and other people with "normal" accents. Sure; you will hear it clearly if you consciously think about the accent, but your unconscious mind has accepted it as who that person is and how they speak - same thing for us with stuttering. Now this is no new, groundbreaking observation. As most of you I've researched stuttering on the web, and the one "cure" that seems to be working best for most people is what's described above - accept that you stutter, accept that that's who you are and that you shouldn't hide it. Seek comfort in knowing that your friends don't care about it and might not even notice it. By accepting that you are, indeed, a stutterer and by not allowing it to rule supreme over your thoughts, you, ironically, will likely stop stuttering all together or at least get better and not be worried about it. We've all had it happen to ourselves - looked back upon situations in which we were totally engulfed in the excitement and spur of the moment and completely forgot to speak carefully and watch out for our stutter - and as such in all forgot to stutter as well. Stuttering is a vicious cycle. This has really turned into a rambling post of grotesque dimensions! Pardon me for that; I'm lying in bed here at 5 am on my phone and am in a low mood these days for reasons both related to and not related to stuttering, and I've never really spoken out about my stutter as thoroughly as here, even though this post doesn't even cover 10% of what the stutter is! Anyway, if you read through all of this, thank you so much for listening, and I wish you good fortune with your stutter!