About the Authors: “Stamily is a diverse and independent community, consisting of people from all over the world. We are highly diverse, with many different passions, life stories, and goals, but have one thing in common: we stutter. Behind the non-fluent speech that you hear on the outside, there are also many ‘hidden’ feelings and experiences that most of us, people who stutter, share. With Stamily we try to create a worldwide network for people who stutter and people who feel connected with us, where everybody can share their struggles, feelings, and achievements in Stamily’s safe space. This gives a feeling of recognition, comfort, and a positive attitude towards stuttering. You are not alone with your stutter. Stuttering creates a bond. Many friendships already started via Stamily-related exchange projects! ” Visit us at stamily.org

In the summer of 2018, an idea grew out of a youth meeting for people who stutter. These meetings have been around in Europe for some time and have been inspiring many participants to become more resilient. From these meetings, there came a desire to have a world-wide network for people who stutter to share their (positive and negative) experiences, achievements and life stories, as well as to make friends from all over the world.

This developed into what we started to call ‘Stamily’ (as a merge of the words ‘family’ and ‘stammering’). The community around Stamily is built upon personal experiences, sharing ups and downs, and bouncing back, within a judgement-free environment. We, the Stamily members, would like to share our experience with resilience. Not only to inspire, but also to motivate others to invest time to create similar networks, or platforms, or to organize something (such as youth exchanges) within their own network to see what comes out of it.

Within Stamily we all have our own experiences with resilience. We know that nobody walks their life path without struggling. We think that by acknowledging this, being able to open up in a safe space, and by having a supportive network around you, you become stronger and better at bouncing back. Of course, this is not solely the case for people who stutter. But this one trait that we share creates a bond through shared experiences in which friendships are fostered that enrich our daily lives.

When we asked our members what resilience means to them, we got the following reply:

“Resilience is acknowledging that things don’t always go as you’d like them to go, realizing that that is okay, and doing what you love regardless of what other people think”.

Or as somebody else said:

“Resilience is the ability to go through difficult/awkward stuttering situations and saying the things you wanted to say even if it took time.”

We say in our philosophy:

“For us, it is about how to live with stuttering, and how to keep our mind-set straight, without letting your stutter have a negative impact on your life.”

Sharing these ideas and experiences in a safe environment also defines the power of Stamily.

The stories on our website, written by people from all over the world, show how resilience works in practice. We all have our own stories on how stuttering has affected our lives, our school years, our jobs, our social lives. But we also have stories on how we dealt with that. How we try to cope with stuttering, and situations that occur due to our stuttering, and how we try to find ways to become more resilient and bounce back. By sharing our stories online, we hope that people who visit our website also become more resilient offline, when they are in their daily lives and have to deal with their own (not always good) experiences. 

The journey of Stamily is more than a collection of individual stories. It is also a story of a community where people feel less alone and where people grow through sharing and experiencing, such that we become more resilient. To not only support the people within the network but also the people who follow Stamily. This is what Stamily represents: a group of people who all live in different parts of the world but unbound by the ability to share, such that they can radiate both their individual and collective story throughout the world to make a change and become more resilient.