# Why did I stop defining myself as a stutterer?

By [Craig Coffee](/craig-coffee)

For years I labeled myself as a stutterer. But I was so much more. I was a son and a brother. A Boy Scout and a runner. I was an A/B student. Still, I defined myself by my obstacle.

I wanted to think of myself as someone [working on my fluency](/acceptance-and-stuttering). That was a change I made inside my own head, while I was still stuttering.

## The words I used for myself

One way I have put it is a person who currently stutters. Another is a person who's working on his fluency. I wanted my way of describing myself to leave room for the work I was doing and the future I wanted.

How could I become fluent while still thinking of myself as a stutterer? That did not make sense to me. I had carried that identity for years, and I did not want it to be the whole picture of who I was.

## I kept the change in my own head

I didn't make a big announcement to my friends and family. I kept it with me. I've described it as making me feel 1% better: just a little bit better that hope was possible.

That mattered to me. I was already having a constant conversation with myself about my speech. [The way I talked to myself](/negative-self-talk-after-stuttering) was part of what I had to work on.

This went alongside [practice and the work on my beliefs](/positive-thinking-and-stuttering). I changed how I described myself before I had the fluency I wanted. It was one of the steps I took while I was learning.

## The picture I used in one group call

I asked the group to picture their life as a ruler, a timeline. Think about the age when the stuttering started and the years from then until now. They didn't have to tell me the number.

Then I described putting a long balloon around those years and tying it off. Inside it were the beliefs I was talking about: it's hard to talk, I get humiliated, I can't say my name. The bad memories and the self-talk were in that picture too.

I asked them to imagine the balloon drifting away, slowly, until they could hardly see it. Then I brought in the thought of being someone working on their fluency. I wanted them to keep that thought inside first.

I said right there that I had never described it that way before. I was trying to explain the change in identity I had made. I also said it took time and that there was a lot of work in the mind and in real practice.

## When someone already thought of themselves differently

A person in that call said their case was different because they had started stuttering as an adult. Their identity was already there. They had been thinking that the stuttering was a phase and that it would pass.

I came back to my own experience of worrying about speech. I said that their way of thinking about it had been different from mine and that I could only say what it was like for me. Then I asked whether they remembered anything about when it began, and said it was okay if they didn't want to talk about it.

## How I think about who we are

I've also written that we are defined by how we treat others. Be gentle and kind. Our past failures and successes don't define us. I was all those other things I had named, and I also stuttered. I was a combination of definitions.

## The words you use for yourself

Thinking of myself as a person working on his fluency helped me leave room for change. That was my choice. Calling yourself a stutterer does not establish what you can or cannot achieve, and you can be open about your speech while working toward your goals.

## Related answers

- [What does fluency mean to me?](/what-fluency-means)
- [What hurt when people mistook my stutter for who I was?](/being-judged-for-your-stutter)
- [Stuttering or stammering: what do I mean?](/stuttering-vs-stammering)

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