Hi Everyone!!

I would love to introduce to you all my friend, Kevin Crona. I was mindlessly scrolling through Facebook one day and stumbled across his post on one of the Stuttering Groups that I’m in. Kevin shared the “salami story” on Facebook and I immediately messaged him and asked for a blog submission. I can’t wait for you all to read it.

Kevin is from Stockholm, Sweden and works as a speech-to-text interpreter. His main interests are music and sports, and he has played guitar for most of his life. Until recently, Kevin admitted that he has barely talked about his stutter with anyone. His acceptance journey has recently started and he has been using Facebook groups as a support/means of sharing his experiences.

I’ve stuttered for as long as I can remember. But as a kid, it was never a very big problem for me. People didn’t even know that I stuttered and it was barely noticeable up until my early 20s or so, where it started affecting me negatively. From this time it has gotten worse and worse.

I was always a shy person, even though I had and have many friends. I would always try my best to avoid social situations. For example, during group assignments in school I would not say anything unless I was asked a question. Even today, if I’m at a dinner party with many people I usually don’t talk a lot, unless someone talks to me. Looking back I believe this is tightly connected to my stutter.

Because of this there were many things I simply never tried in life – for better and for worse, I guess! As a teen I wanted to learn Mandarin (Chinese) so I signed up for a class. During class I was asked to say a phrase, and the teacher said my speech/pronunciation was very weird and bad, and that I needed to get it together. The result? I quit and thought languages are not for me, even though I was always very interested in learning them.

Now I’m 31, and only very recently (the last few weeks) I started working on this for real, once for all you could say. I’m on a quest towards bravery and confidence! I am also currently learning Italian, because I no longer believe in avoiding things because they are tough, and most importantly I no longer believe that anything is impossible. 

A few weeks ago I went to my local supermarket. There is a really nice deli disk there, where they cut up what you want for you. I am a big fan of salami, and they have really nice ones there. I went there once, a long time ago, and I had a very tough time talking and explaining what I wanted etc. This resulted in me not going there anymore, and instead settling for the precut one in boxes, which is far from as good! This time though, I was going to get the good salami no matter the consequences. I grabbed a number for the queue and waited for my turn. I was a bit nervous for my first phrase, but once I got past that, it was all good. I spoke freely and told the girl at the disk what I wanted. I even made a joke! I am actually pretty funny when given the opportunity – or when I take the opportunity, I should say. It was a great (and later on that day, delicious!) experience and things/successes like this really make me feel like I’m on top of the world, unstoppable.

Since then I’ve had some up and downs, but I understand that it will take time. Baby steps, right? I intend to keep on with this journey of exposing myself to things like that, even if they are frightening, because from now on I am not letting this stutter stop me from doing what I want.