Just returned home from tonight’s meeting. There were 15 wonderful people who stutter and two graduate SLP students in attendance. David L. did a great job guest leading. He facilitated a really dynamic meeting. I can be very long winded, so will keep it to 3 highlights.
1) We started out talking about dating and stuttering. Creepily enough, multiple people in the room had been on blind dates where the person found out about their stuttering via Google before meeting them. Take home message from this discussion (and the past weeks news digest) : nothing is private, especially when the NSA is involved.
2) David led us on a trip down memory lane by asking about our highlights of past NSA Conferences. Samantha G spoke about the rewards of becoming a mentor/leader over the years, and Eric J. about how “conference friends” are made quickly and kept for the long term. Ismail K is going this year for this first time, and spoke about his apprehension about not knowing anyone. We all jumped in to assure him that he will be very quickly scooped up by the river of friendliness (plus we will be there to hang out with!)
3) Jobs. More than a few of us spoke about feeling held back by our stuttering, now or in the past. Lori talked about pursuing a specific career because she would not have to speak much – then dropping it all years later to follow her passion and enroll in nursing school. I think we all agree that there will be dark moments of self-doubt, but hope that moving forward in spite of our fears is worth the dark moments.
Enjoy the nice weather before NYC becomes an inescapable sauna…See you in July!