I’ll be out Friday and Saturday, but should be back to posting by Sunday. Here are some general notes and observations from the conference. I may have alluded to some of this before as well.
Sunday I’ll work on a link roundup — should be a pretty big one since I haven’t done one in a while. There’s a lot of good stuff that’s just been produced out there on stuttering.
1. If you’re going to go next year to Chicago, make sure to bring a hoodie or light coat. In some of the conference rooms, it was really, really cold.
1a. You know they’ve already posted the dates for Chicago? Crazy! And it looks like I may be able to do the NSA-Tour de France double again as well.
2. It was interesting being able to introduce myself (or stutter away at it, anyway) and not bail out and point to my name tag.
2a. A friend told me once to just say my name a few hundred times to get used to it. Yeah, that doesn’t help.
3. I was still having to steal a glance at other people’s nametags because as usual, I was so worried about saying my own name that I would forget theirs.
4. Nobody will finish your sentences or words for you. This was a little weird to me as well. I’m somewhat used to this happening, so maybe that’s why I don’t seem to stutter as much around the office. It’s annoying and degrading, and I’m still going to keep on stuttering through, but to be in such a friendly environment was a whole new experience.
5. After making some new friends, we’d sit around, and I’d hear my own stories come from their mouths. The same heartache on the phone, or while ordering food, or whatever.
6. I wish the conference could have been longer, but at the same time, I was pretty spent at the end of each day — thinking so much about my own stuttering as well as speaking and stuttering so much.
7. Maybe as you’re reading all this stuff about the conference, you think I’m going overboard a little. Well, mostly with stuttering everything that I remember is negative. So there is always a negative association. With all of these posts and remembering what happened, I want to focus on and emphasize the positive.
8. I was wondering why some of the workshops seemed light on attendance. Then I remembered we were in DC — and people wanted to get out and about in town. For me I was only interested in the conference and going to as many workshops as possible. I grew up only 2 hours from DC, so I’d already seen and done the touristy stuff.
Hello. I stutter. 