You have found the courage to speak anonymously, and that is important. That may sound like sarcasm, but I understand completely how you feel. I had a talk with a friend a while back and I went through the exact same thing. The stuttering as you find you don't know the word to put to what you feel. You notice that this is only talking, it's such a simple thing, why is it so hard?

Courage is a funny thing, it doesn't really exist between hardships, and it doesn't grow or shrink during that time either, the only change in courage is when you choose to act and create courage, or choose to not act. You are afraid to talk about your feelings, afraid because you think those emotions don't belong with the image of who you believe you are supposed to be. Confronting yourself is the only way to move forward, and among all the herculean tasks in the world this can be the hardest.

The trouble with fear is that it exists both during and between hardships. It hangs as a residual fog that obscures the difficulties, that turns you away from them and pleads with you desperately to never, NEVER, look back in that direction. It is a fog that slowly dims everything in your life until you can hardly see the time passing by you.

But that is all fear is. Just a fog which tries desperately to convince us it is impossible to walk through.

And here we come back to courage, that thing that exists only in the moments where the hardship finds us once again, despite our running.

You have created a small measure of courage, this means that you can create even more next time. Good luck on finding help to walk through that fog, there are ALWAYS people who want to help, and there is always a way to get there.

Thank you for sharing how you feel, but if you only remember one thing from what I wrote, let it please be this:

You are not a spectator of your life, you are it.