I developed a stutter or as some people call it a stammer in childhood. I have spoken to my family regarding this and they have confirmed that I developed it when I was a young boy.
Despite regular speech therapy over the next fourteen years my stutter became worse. I remember quite clearly the fear of having to read out from a book in class. On entering the classroom I would notice that there was a reading book on each and every desk. I would start to panic straight away believing the teacher would make me read a paragraph. Just waiting my turn, knowing that it would result in yet another one of those stuttering moments would be torture.
Socialising with friends was not exactly easy for me either. I am fairly sure that the majority of people enjoy going out with their friends and even look forward to the prospect. For me though this was not the case, I would be counting down the days as the week went on.
My worst area of speech was using the telephone. I certainly had a phobia to the phone and was quite lucky as my father would make a lot of my calls for me. Some people may say that this was not exactly helping me in the long run. This may be correct and I was very grateful at the time.
After leaving school, I started to attend interviews to try to find employment including a very bad one at a business cost cutting company. I would normally stutter more when under pressure or when meeting new people and both of these situations are prevalent in an interview situation. I would normally arrive at the interview very tired after a lack of sleep through the stress of it all and I have to say found it very difficult to convince any employer to take me on.
As you can no doubt imagine I was eager to find a way of stopping stuttering and I did eventually attain fluency after purchasing a seventy minute self-help stuttering therapy DVD from the UK. I now live happy and successful life and as a career I now I work for a DVD authoring company.
This was my history of having a stutter and as you can see it was to have a happy ending – stuttering can be overcome with hard work and dedication.