Last night, the Dallas Chapter of the National Stuttering Association held it’s monthly meeting, and here’s a quick recap of what happened.
With 17 people in attendance including 2 new members (welcome Ryan and Raunak!), a person driving 5 hours to see us (that’s commitment, Deven!) and one personal friend of the chapter (thanks for coming, Laura!) we were ready to have a great time.
Last month, we found out that our chapter was celebrating it’s 35th year anniversary and since the Dallas Chapter doesn’t let an opportunity to celebrate pass, this month we had some delicious cake to celebrate… look!
But we had a meeting to take care of, so as usual we started with introductions, and our icebreaker this month was: “Choose something from your wallet/purse/yourself and tell us why it’s important to you”. These questions are always a good opportunity to get to know each other. We heard stories about bracelets, prayers, gifts from strangers, written goals and the ever important cellphone charger as something that is always in our purses/wallets.
After that we went through some quick announcements (while eating cake!) that included: Eric Maye being our Spotlight of the month, our fun karaoke outing a couple weeks ago, and the upcoming NSA conference being just FIVE weeks away! You can read all about the conference HERE. If you haven’t registered you are running out of time, don’t say we didn’t warn you!
Finally, we got to our main topic of the night “Dealing with the Difficult Days of Stuttering”, that was presented by Dallas’ own Marcus Peters. Marcus is a staple at our chapter meetings, member of the “Young Adults Committee” and overall cool guy. We were all excited to hear him lead our meeting for the first time.
Marcus told us that when he started college he found himself thousands of miles away from home. There, he had to face the difficulties of stuttering in a new environment. While his experiences were unique to himself, the feelings were something we could all relate to, as he recalled feeling like “every conversation felt like an uphill battle”, reaching a point where he “felt alone and depressed” and that he was never going to recover from it.
Luckily, when he felt at his lowest point and had even considered dropping out of college because speaking had become such a difficult talk for him, he met an SLP that totally changed his perspective and helped him discover that “successful communication is more than talking”. We heard about the importance of setting objective, daily goals to counteract those subjective negative feelings (“if you don’t set goals everything is a failure”), and how the only way to face your fears is going at them straight forward, one at a time, until they don’t feel scary anymore.
After Marcus’ great presentation we shared personal experiences related to the topic and finally we broke into smaller groups to allow everybody an opportunity to talk.
… And with that, we concluded another great meeting of the mighty Dallas Chapter!
Thanks to everybody for making our chapter so special and we’ll see you in a couple weeks for our June Chat and Chew. Keep your eye out for an email!
Keep talking,
Dallas NSA