I’d been letting calls go to voicemail for three years. Work calls, doctor appointments, you name it… everything. I had a whole system for avoiding them. Then one afternoon my phone rang and for some reason, I really still don’t know why I just picked it up. I blocked on the first word, then the second. The person on the other end waited, I nearly hung up, but for some strange reason they didn’t hang up either. They just waited, so after that moment that felt like forever, i kept going and I got through it!!! It took twice as long as it should have, but i didn’t care, Afterwards I silently cried in my car afterwards, not because it was hard, but because I felt the silence and did it anyway.

In school I used to rehearse every sentence before I said it. I’d swap words out for easier ones, avoid anything starting with certain letters. By the time I got to university I’d basically built a second language for myself one designed entirely around hiding. I’m 34 now. I still do it sometimes but I don’t let it define me, last year I gave a presentation at work and I didn’t swap a single word. I said what I meant to say, stutter and all. Nobody laughed, smirked or chuckled. One colleague came up to me afterwards and said it was the most honest presentation he’d ever heard. I didn’t know what to do with that.

People don’t understand why saying your own name is the hardest thing. It’s the one word you can’t avoid, you can’t find a synonym, you can try and add extra words in front, but you still gotta say your name. You can’t go quiet and hope someone else answers. It’s yours and you have to say it. I used to get to the front of queues and just point at things on menus because I knew my name would block and everyone would stare. I still have hard days. But I said my name at a job interview last year first word, full block the interviewer waited and I got the job. I think about that a lot. It feels like i have more self-assurance since then.

Your story doesn’t have to be finished or it doesn’t have to have a neat ending. It just has to be you and your experience with stuttering. If something you’ve read here felt familiar such as the avoidance, the exhaustion or the small win nobody else noticed. There’s someone else out there who needs to read yours. Please send it in. We’ll never publish anything without checking with you first.

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Every story here is an act of courage. Yours will be too.