For as long as I can remember, I have always had a stutter, I have lived with it my entire adult life and I don’t know how it can be any other way.
My mother told me that when I was 5, a dog bit me on the leg and since then I started stuttering. I remember this event very vaguely. My first memories of stuttering are from school, like when I had to read, but I stuttered. Or when I had to recite poems, but here at least I could pretend that I had forgotten, so as not to pronounce a difficult-to-pronounce word. Going to the store always turned into torture for me, if I could pronounce the word bread without problems, then milk is still one of my least favorites, so I preferred to go to the store for milk with a can, because I didn’t have to say anything, I just held out the can and that’s it.
In high school, my stuttering got worse, and although I was basically a good student, when I was called to the board to answer, I often preferred to mutter "Not ready" and get a bad grade than to stutter and blush in front of the whole class. I made up for my grades with written assignments, there was no need to worry about them, and as I already said, I was not a stupid boy, so I was a solid B student. I did not meet girls, because I was a modest and shy boy, and also with a stutter. Well, and the ram weight of 45 kg, with a height of 170 cm, also did not make me a man of girls' dreams. At the institute, everything continued exactly the same as at school. Until in the second year, I had a terrible depression, from which one teacher brought me out, noticing the emptiness in my eyes and having a heart-to-heart talk with me.
Since then my life has changed a lot, I stopped being embarrassed about my thinness and stuttering and calmly began to meet girls on the streets. I passed tests and exams relatively calmly and without stuttering. Stuttering faded into the background, but still sometimes, no-no, it popped up.
I remember very well my speech of gratitude to the guests at my wedding in my 4th year of college, when I am nervous and stutter, I usually talk complete nonsense. Then I always rewound that moment on the tape, I was so ashamed. The day of my diploma defense was slowly approaching, and my horror from the understanding that I would have to give a report was spreading wider and wider. And although I wrote my diploma myself, and knew it from cover to cover, I still wound myself up and wound myself up. Surprisingly, the defense of my diploma project went smoothly, I started and then there was no stopping me.
Yes, I forgot to mention that with my stuttering the hardest thing was always to start, the very first word. After college, work. The stuttering didn't go away. I was working as an oil production operator then. It was always hard for me to call the dispatcher to make a request or transfer data on a round. Then work as a technologist and leading technologist. It was the happiest time with a minimum of stuttering. At work, I had to make phone calls very often, so I quickly got used to it and was no longer afraid of phone calls. True, then they started promoting me up the career ladder, and there was much less of that phone work and I again began to be afraid of phone calls.
In fairness, it should be noted that I tried to fight my illness, actively participated in various amateur competitions with songs to the guitar, was the captain of the local KVN team. The fear of the stage disappeared, but in life the fear of speech and stuttering remained. And since then it has only worsened. My stuttering began to actively worsen after moving to Moscow two years ago. A change of scenery, a new, unfamiliar job, stress did their dirty work. I could no longer just call on the phone. For me, this was real torture. And if I could still more or less do it when alone, in front of strangers I simply froze. I had to leave the office into the hallway and call work from my personal cell phone, just so that no one would hear. The calls were not so frequent, so the fear of them grew and grew. Now I could only call my friends, over time, this became problematic. Eventually, I got to the point where I stuttered even when I was talking on the phone with my mom. And I stuttered a lot.
It became difficult for me to call my daughters because of my stuttering, and so I rarely called them, for which I constantly scolded myself. A simple phone call for me became a signal to stutter. It was HELL. When the boss, giving an assignment, said that I needed to call someone, I would break out in a sweat, and after that I would immediately become stupid, listen to the rest with half an ear, and did not always understand what they wanted from me. Winding myself up, I began to stutter even without a phone. Communication with colleagues at work turned into torture. It became difficult for me to ask even a basic question to friends. I was completely locked up. I was in constant tension. My body was like a spring, my jaws were clenched, I was terribly tired. I tried to speak only in short phrases, I stopped telling jokes, funny stories.
True, after drinking alcohol, in the company of friends, sometimes it was simply impossible to stop me, I missed normal speech without stuttering. Where possible, I asked friends and relatives to call for me - to order something, to find out something, to ask for something. What saved me (or most likely, on the contrary, aggravated my stuttering) was that in our 21st century, live communication is no longer necessary, e-mail, various messengers have made life much easier for stutterers. And how much joy supermarkets bring to stutterers, where you don’t have to say anything, just put groceries in a basket, you can’t even imagine.
Yes, I tried to cure my stuttering, although I started very late, when I had been stuttering for well over 20 years. Now I am putting myself in the hands of Liliya Zinovyevna Arutyunyan. I am tired of my stuttering and I believe that I can overcome it. At the moment, this is my main dream and GOAL.