That's interesting. Here's my experience: I used to stutter really badly when I was younger. It had a MASSIVE impact on me, and I really think it shaped me as a person in ways so profound I probably don't even realise the full impact of it to this day, despite the fact that I rarely stutter at all these days.

It was hell. Absolute hell. Imagine being a kid, and engaging with the world for the first time, and being totally hamstrung by the fact that you just can't express yourself. It's not that you can't talk properly, or that you find talking difficult - it's that you can't express yourself. That's the most galling and frustrating thing. Other people seem to use spoken language completely naturally - it's just a medium they move through without having to think about it, like water for a fish. If you stutter, you're literally crippled in a very fundamental way.

I've spoken about stuttering to friends over the years, and tried to describe what it's like. It seemed like it would be really easy - "you know, it's like...". It was such a huge part of my experience as a human being that I thought it would be easy to find some similar experience that everyone has that everyone could relate to. It was incredibly hard to find a relateable analogue. The closest thing I could think of was when you need to sneeze but the sneeze won't come - like that, it's a totally physical thing. Imagine that, but instead of snot, what you want to get out of your head is all your opinions and feelings and everything that makes you you.

Imagine that that is your experience of language in your most formative years. Talking is something that's hard and often embarassing. You can't do something that should be simple and effortless. It should be easier than walking. But for some reason, for you, it's always problematic. It's hard work. Every word is hard won. You can't just express yourself like "normal people".

There are positives, though. You develop a bunch of strategies to minimise the impact of your speech difficulties. For me, I new that there were certain sounds I would find it hard to start a sentence with. W words were kind of tricky, because they were quite breathy, and D words were tough too. So I became adept at rearranging sentences on the fly - I'd want to say X, but know I couldn't say it the way I first thought of it, so I'd re-arrange the sentence so I could get a bit of a run-up to the tricky sounds I'd have to make. Normal people don't have to do this shit.

I'm super aware of the physicality of words. I have a huge vocabulary because the first word I think of might not be a word I can say easily. I'm good at listening because I was always shit at talking. I am fucking good at writing because that was always a way where I could clearly express myself. That's kind of what I do for a job now, and I always think Im only good at it because language was something I found so hard when I was younger.