Ever since I can remember, I've had a stutter. I'm not sure how I developed it or when exactly it became a part of who I am, but what I can tell you is that it has impacted me and helped shape me as a person.
Living with my stutter was one of the hardest things for me growing up. When I was younger and in elementary school, I would get bullied and laughed at because I would talk funny or I would drag my sentences out. When I got to second grade, my teachers suggested that I take speech therapy classes. I continued taking these classes every day until the fifth grade. During these classes, my speech therapist would make me do speaking exercises, so that when I would speak I could "control" my stuttering. When I got to the end of fifth grade my speech therapist said that I was doing excellently and that I no longer needed speech classes. I was so excited that I could finally talk like a "normal" child and would not be picked on for my speech.
My "normal" speech did not last too long. When I got to seventh grade, my stutter came back, and pretty bad. At this point, I was too old for speech therapy, so I had to help myself and go through the exercises that my therapist taught me. It was a pretty rough year. I would stutter when talking to my friends and they would ask "Why do you do that?" "When you say your A words why do you go aaaaaa?" etc. At first, it bothered me and I would get upset because I didn't know why I did these things. I just knew that I couldn't talk right half of the time and it made me upset.
As I got older and school teachers would begin to call on students to read, it made me very nervous. Of course, by now you can guess why I was nervous; I mean, I had a hard time just trying to talk to my friends. Whenever I got called on, I would ask to just not read and for them to call on someone else. Nine times out of 10, they would refuse and make me read anyway. I've always been a smart kid, but what made me the most upset, is when I would know the word, but I couldn't say it because of my stutter, and the teacher or a fellow student would just say the word for me. It would make me feel like I was slower than the rest of my classmates.
This continued on until I graduated high school; the only thing that changed is I embraced my stutter. I grew tired of people finishing my sentences and saying words that I couldn't say. Instead of growing bitter about my situation, I just embraced it. My stutter has become a part of my personality; it is a huge part of who I am. Even being 20 years old, I still have to work on my speech and I have to mentally prepare myself when I have to read out loud.
It hasn't really been a "struggle," because, I mean, it's only a stutter, but it didn't make my younger years too easy. I've just learned how to deal with it and embrace it as my own.
