Last Tuesday, October 25th the Dallas Chapter of the National Stuttering Association held it’s monthly meeting, and here’s a quick recap of the event!

We had 16 PWS and one best friend since second grade (welcome to the group, Justin, you are family now!) and we jumped right in because we had a lot to talk about.

We started with introductions and this time we decided to mix things up a little bit. Instead of everybody introducing themselves like usual, we had to talk to the person to our right, ask them “What is one thing about you that very few people know?” and then introduce them to the group. This allowed us to discover new, unexpected things from our members, like learning that Daniel knows how to play the saxophone, Curtis lived in Germany in the ’60s and Yadira having a twin brother (who doesn’t stutter!).

After that fun activity we went into announcements. We started with a small recap of all the International Stuttering Awareness Day activities we had the previous weekend: On Friday, the Callier Center at UTD and the Dallas NSA chapter hosted a screening of the documentary “The Way We Talk”, and on Saturday we ran a Tough Mudder under the name “Stutter On!” with the purpose of “racing awareness”.

If you missed the full recap of the screening, you can read the whole thing and look at the photos HERE, and if you want to see how a Tough Mudder looks like (and possibly be glad that you didn’t join us) here are some awesome photos for you:

7f6c1540-ec0e-4325-9681-7b2d512c7259 17f761a8-e403-4240-a9c1-275ac400c264 b040a85f-cb4e-4af0-a638-badb8bbec2f6 d696eea9-b9d1-4f25-868f-625748b2bbc3

It was challenging, muddy, powerful and a great way to strengthen the bonds in our chapter. Did I say muddy? It was MUDDY!

Back to our meeting, we moved on to our main topic for the evening: “Things I wish I knew about stuttering when I was younger”.

Stuttering, like many things in life, is an ongoing journey with constant evolution, and as such, you learn and discover things all the time; things about your stuttering, about yourself, and about other people. Many of those things can be real “game changers”, but sadly, we don’t always get them early in life, and it’s only after years of experience that those important lessons come to the surface.

With that in mind, we broke up into small groups with the goal of discussing and coming up with a good list of things, or lessons, that everybody that stutters could use. After some time and input from everybody present, we came up with a very good list that included the following:

I wish I knew…

… that stuttering is not a big deal.
… that the more I talk the easier it gets.
… that stuttering affects me more than anybody else around me.
… that there is more to good communication that talking.
… that is our responsibility to educate others.
… that people remember more about me than my stutter.
… that I don’t have to hide it.
… that I don’t have to let other people make me feel less.
… that stuttering is not my fault.

And finally, possibly the most powerful lesson: I wish I knew that I was never alone.

If there is one thing we all agreed on was that having a strong supportive community can make all the difference in the world, and coming to these meetings (together with the annual conferences),
have been and continue to be the “life changing” event for most of us.

What better way to end our meeting than that?

Do you have any other important lessons that you think should be added to our list? Share them on our Facebook page to keep the conversation going!

Keep talking, and see you next month!