About the Author: Masoud Madadi (b. 2003, Iran) is a person who stutters and an active member of the Iranian Stuttering Association. He launched the first Persian-language podcast on stuttering in 2021 and has since been engaged in organizing community events to support and empower people who stutter.

Monday, 8 a.m. My turn to read aloud. My name was called and the room got small. I asked to skip. The teacher said if I didn’t read, I would have to leave. The last time I read, my classmates laughed for five long minutes.

I began. The first vowel stuck in my throat. I tried to hop over the block like a video-game jump. My lips tightened. My palms sweated. I pressed my feet into the floor and kept my head down while every eye found me. Then the teacher moved on.

This happened every week. I felt like I disappeared and came back once every Monday. In nine years of school, I don’t remember speaking up in class. I have stuttered as far back as I can remember. Not a day without it—at school, at home, everywhere. Like a shadow that wouldn’t leave.

Maybe I could have lived with it—but why me? By fifteen, I had never met a single person who talked like me. Everyone else seemed to say whatever they wanted, as fast as they wanted, without freezing, tripping, or burning with embarrassment. I felt like I had crash-landed on Earth alone.

Thinking I was the only one ate me alive. Pain is heavy, but thinking you carry it alone makes it unbearable. No one I knew stuttered. I started to believe this was forever. Some people are born without the use of their legs. Some are blind. Me? I had a tongue that felt locked.

So I stopped talking for a while. Not out of shame—out of exhaustion. I was tired of fighting for every word. Tired of the looks and the laughter. Tired of replaying every conversation in my head, blaming myself. I went quiet—with everyone, even with myself.

Silence didn’t help. It only made me more alone. When you stop speaking, you start to fade. And when no one sees you, it feels like you don’t exist.

One night I couldn’t stand it anymore. I grabbed my phone—not to escape, but to search. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. Maybe a sign. Maybe a voice that sounded like mine.

I typed: “people who stutter.”
Then: “why am I the only one who stutters?”
Then: “loneliness and stuttering.”

And there it was: “Iran Stuttering Association: a place where no one is alone.”

I froze. Someone had put my feelings into words. They met every Friday in a park. People like me. My spaceship wasn’t the only one that had crash-landed—there were other survivors.

That Friday, I went. Eight people were there. Usually the word “stutter” made me shrink, but that day we talked about it for two hours. I left with more energy than I had felt in years. I learned stuttering wasn’t an impossible riddle. People could live well with it. Most of all, I learned I wasn’t alone.

I kept going every week. Through the group I met a speech therapist and started treatment. The people I met shattered my walls. I thought a person who stutters couldn’t be a teacher—then I met Mazaher. I thought we couldn’t be university professors—then I met Saeed. A successful salesperson? Yasin. An actor? Dariush. He played the lead in a film.

The greatest gift the Association gave me was breaking the picture in my head of what was “possible” with a stutter. Before, it felt like a monster sitting on top of every dream. Then I met people who stuttered more than I did—and still built the lives I believed were closed to me.

I’m twenty-two now. Eight years have passed since those dark Mondays. I’m at university. I have a job where I talk with people all day. I have hosted two Persian podcasts that found real audiences. I’ve turned the “no way” of my fourteen-year-old self into “done.”

Now my mission is to raise awareness about stuttering—because I know something I didn’t know back then:

“The greatest pain is to feel alone in an indifferent world.”
No one should have to carry that alone.