April 10 Meeting Update

Ten people attended, nine PWS and one speech pathology student from Cal State Fullerton. A member brought his mom, who also stutters. This sparked a discussion about the genetic component of stuttering. We discussed how difficult it is to really know if others in your family stutter because there's often denial about it and reluctance to talk even when it's not hidden.

We also talked about the unpredictability of stuttering. It's the most difficult aspect of it to live with on a day to day basis. Even within the same day, you can have hours of fluency, and then a block can come out of nowhere like a slap in the face. There's no magic solution for this, just taking every day or hour or minute at a time and doing the best you can. Stuttering is extremely complex. One member gave a very insightful definition of it: a condition where neuroscience and psychology intersect in a very interesting way.

Even so, people from our group are handling it beautifully. One member, after an intense interview process, received two job offers, one of them in computer programming within the field of medicine. Another made a successful start in his new job. He was nervous but, in retrospect, he realized that he made the situation more difficult in his head than it turned out to be. How many of us can identify with that!

Many of us are making changes in our lives. We are saying yes to things that scare us. That's all that matters: not to get rid of fear, but to do what we want to do anyway.