I have to share my personal sentiment about this. I was born with a stutter, and was lucky enough to get 2 years of speech therapy during pre-K as a child.
I don't stutter anymore. In fact, I've compensated a bit and am a very good speaker when I need to be. Only, I still stumble on my *thoughts*. Yes, my thoughts stick. I pause, maybe say 'um', and continue. It turns out, after careful reflection during Ayahuasca ceremonies, it is something deeper in my brain that gets stuck. Therapy fixed the topical problem, but something deeper still remains. In fact, I have come to believe I have some kind of weird working memory deficit perhaps, or some other kink in the algorithm of fluid thought.
When I'm down and feeling like crap about life I develop some OCD rituals that make it so I have the hardest time leaving the house in under 2-4 hours of time after waking. After a severe depression in 2011, it took me over a year to get out of the house on a regular basis. I was all alone, in my studio apartment. I had no family, and very few friends around me at that time. The stutter had come back as a sticking point in another part of my behavioral life!
I literally couldn't leave the house, and I'd never 'noticed' OCD-like behaviors in myself before. I've never been a hand washing type, or a counter, or the other stereotypical things this category of mental illness does routinely, ritually. I never did any of the rituals. But it certainly got weird when I was severely depressed and I found I couldn't leave the house unless I 'finished' all these worthless little things unnecessary for my day ahead. It was a very extreme situation I found myself in. I can only be grateful now that psychedelics have come back into my life after a decade of no weed, no alcohol, no drugs of any kind (besides alprazolam, which I *loath* for the shadow side it has). What a stupid idea it was for me to give up cannabis and psychadelics for a xanax prescription that made me feel like a junky, and added cumulative psychological load to my life! My god, that was COMPLETELY the wrong direction to go. 20/20 hindsight....
Ayahuasca is teaching me how to be fluid. I don't know if I'll ever fully get past whatever my physical impediment is, but when my brain shuts up and my soul shines through, there isn't any problem with fluidity at all. That's partly why I've been doing microdosing myself lately. I have to record a lot of audio, (and some video) at the current moment. The intended audience is very large, and if I don't find a way to make myself a universal pitch to the public, then all is a futile waste of time. Psychedelics are the ONLY thing that work this well for me. Alcohol makes me less inhibited, but that's not the same thing. That's something completely different. Cannabis helps, but it also makes me forgetful, which from a therapeutic perspective simply gums things up differently as well. Microdosing psychedelics is something truly profound, bordering on magical or divine. Beyond words.
By the way, Ayahuasca has taught me that whatever my problem is, it is now my language that is my anchor to reality and navigation through my memories. I essentially cannot think if I stop using words. I can clear my mind in meditation, but words creep back in. I tried something abstract as a teenager after taking LSD, and tried to go a full week without using words at all... That was a major mistake. I ended up being bordering-on catatonic for a month after (maybe more like 6 weeks). :/
Sometimes I hate the fact that my mind never seems to shut up, but at the same time, my linguistic talents have carried me very, very far in life. Why hate on that? Just accept it, go with it, accept it as you. I try not to care about whether I sound like I'm fluid, or coming off like a wooden actor from an old John Wayne movie. The real me is a balance between my soul's message & my brain's ability to vocalize it, (and consolidate it as declarative memory). People that know me in the flesh know me as a living, walking polymath of topics, able to talk circles around academics within their own fields, (when I'm feeling up to it). I'm partly good at talking experts in circles because I am very, very good at asking critical questions and waiting for them to stumble on their own ideas. Questions are the bait, and the trap I've been catching people in all my life is something NO ONE sees coming. I've gotten a lot of "who WAS that guy?" type of responses in my time. The people that ask that have always been very confused. They have no idea where the heck I came from, nor where I disappear to after all is said and done. But I'm beginning to use my strengths in different, more productive ways now. Things are getting better all the time.
I just haven't done jack with the soul half of my 'self' yet in life... That's where I'm playing a little catch up right now. I'm bonding with my true self, and learning not to be afraid of who I am. That stuttering kid within me is long gone, and the childlike soul in me is starting to grow again. The rest are just details.
![Smile](/forum/images/emoticons/smile.png)