I don't know who I am anymore.

I have now lived in Los Angeles for a total of almost 7 months, it still doesn't feel very much like home to me. I am struggling to find friends, I am struggling to find a community that I connect with, and I am struggling to not lose myself. I have a constant worry in the back of my mind whenever I go go out. Fear has been more prevalent in these last few months than it ever has in my life before. This is a new feeling, and all I want to do is recapture my old self again. 

I booked a flight to New York for that exact reason, to recapture myself, whatever parts of me I knew and loved are still there and I'm trying to find her desperately, whether I spend my time roaming the streets, hanging out with friends, or just walking in and out of bodegas, I need a new environment. Some place that will help me step out of where I am now. I've never been so unhappy and Im unsure of how to pull myself out of this funk. Im hoping that New York will ground me in ways I haven't been able to be grounded here in LA. It's crazy because some people wish to leave New York with such vigor, and I wish everyday to go back. I just can't step out of this depression that I'm in. I don't feel safe while in it, I don't feel like I value myself and I don't feel valued by other people, I have to find myself all over again, and that is partly what I'm hoping this trip with give me. There is a chance that I will leave unfulfilled, which is a frightful prospect but it will also let me know that my journey to my self, isn't based in some city or friends, but within myself...which lets be honest, I already knew that, I just want to get out of LA. It represents nothing good for me. Nothing

I've begun doing speech therapy weekly with Heather my speech pathologist in New York via Skype. She is always a nice reminder of the life I had before moving here. Of course we are focusing as always on Cognitive reshaping, but also delving a bit more into physical changes with my speech. So not only focusing on changing my thinking patterns where it pertains to my speech but also changing how I physically deal with tension in the moments of stuttering.  To work on my cognitive restructuring, I have begun making a list of positive thoughts to replace the negative thoughts that I often have when stuttering. 

During moments of stuttering, specially with people I do not know, my mind often goes to place like..."You sound so stupid, who is going to trust you when you can barely get your words out" I can then replace that thought with the thought "Stuttering and my intelligence do not correlate with each other" Now although my negative stuttering thought seems infinitely more personal and plain mean and my positive thought feels a bit more generic, I am assuming its a start. 

"Does it matter much, what this person thinks about my intelligence?"

"He isn't hiring me or paying my bills" This comment then gives people who do have the job of hiring me a little more power than I would like for them to have, but, baby steps I'm guessing. One of the most important things i have to remember is "My time is just as important. If I take a couple od extra seconds, so be it" This is difficult because I am super aware of time, always have been, and I'm most aware of time when I am speaking, always trying not to waste another persons time, because that is what I think stuttering is. A time waster, and I, deep down inside myself am not a time waster, I value time. 

A few tactics to fight these negative thoughts, I will be trying. One is to stutter so severely to make my listener walk away. Giving myself this experience will desensitize me the perceived feeling it will give me, and force me to actually experience this. Another one is to always stutter on the first word I say, this gets the fact that I stutter out there, so there isn't any hiding from that point on.

These are  few of the exercises that I will try this week. To be honest, I am not motivated to do any of it. Ive lost all motivation over the past few months. Im always exhausted, nothing seems to be going right, but I will try, because there is a little part of me left, that still has to try. Im just hoping that doesn't get stomped out in the process. 

My life has turned upside-down

I moved to Los Angeles. I never wanted to move back to Los Angeles, it wasn't the plan I had for my life and it definitely wasn't in my plan to move here in a moments notice, but life throws some crazy shit at you. Knives. I feel like knives are being thrown at me. Sharp butchering knives. And i don't feel like this all the time but I do go in and out of this daze, and by daze I mean crying episodes where i repeat "how did this become my life?"

I live in La, with my mother and grandmother, and I am now their caretaker. I can't really speak on their ailments, because we are still seeing doctors trying to figure out exactly what is going on, but I can say that my life has changed and the people that I once knew are no longer those same people and it hurts my heart to the core. So many emotions have risen for me, anger at my mom for letting it get this far, hopelessness for my life and what it will now become, fear that I will never be able to accomplish all of the goals I had set in my mind, fear that no man would ever want to be with a girl who is taking care of her family,uncertainty about the future our financial situations, I am an only child, there is only me, I am alone in this and i don't really know what to do. Im calling doctors all day, fighting with family who no longer know who I am, I don't even have the energy to think about planning something for myself or self care, or any of that, I feel like i have been placed in a steel box thats been chained shut.

Ive been forcing optimism out my ass for the past 4 weeks since my move, and Im nearly all out. I see no silver lining at this moment. And more importantly I'm tired of the "everything happens for a reason" speech. i don't want to hear it, I don't want to hear "God has big plans for you" or "when one door closes another opens" I don't want to hear it. I just left my friends, my job, the love interest, my 7 years of building relationships and a life in New York, a city I've wanted to move to since I was 13, to take care of one person who is completely evil to me and another who it breaks my heart to see in this condition.

I want more for myself than this. I need more, I won't be happy taking care of other people for the rest of my life, its some peoples calling but it isn't mines.
I also understand this feeling is just a moment, and I will adapt, but the shock of this situation has yet to sink in.

I feel so lost.

Im Going Going Back Back to Therapy

The email's been sent, the appointment is made, Im going back to speech therapy and I am beyond excited about it. Its been about a year since my last visit. Im combing over the past year trying to figure out why I left, and dig though what was going on with me that made me make the decision to leave. I think some of it was me wanting to see how far I could go on my own, if I could stick to my positive thinking and redirect myself whenever I fell off track, which i did for a good while, but then I veered left, then went off the road, drove into a lake, canoed back to shore, then for some reason took a helicopter far far away from where I initially began. And the whole stuttering on live tv thing just furthered it. (You can check my previous post for that juicy story.) But now Im back home. Not to mention my therapist is maybe one of my top ten favorite people in the world and I don't know why I would decide to go an entire year without seeing her face, it just doesn't make any sense.

If I force myself to do a little more self exploration, for me, returning to therapy was a sign of failure. I failed at curing myself, I failed at living my life without this extra bit of help. During this year I didn't go to a support group, I didnt see any of my friends who stutter, I completely left the stuttering world, (except for those of you who sent messages via youtube or Facebook, I still love talking people through their stuttering ups and downs, because that journey, is rough.) At the same time I joined the comedy world, met some invaluable people who are now important fixtures in my life, and now I believe I can merge the two. Maybe this is just how my brain works, I need immerse myself in one thing, step back then figure out how to fit it into my life. I do a lot, and know a lot of people and its the prioritizing of it that can get very difficult.

Im also, applying for new jobs in comedy writing, and video production and to be completely honest, the whole job interview process scares the shit out of me. Maybe because I've experienced enormous amounts of rejection in the past (as have everyone else applying for jobs, I'm aware of that) But nothing is more crushing that sitting down for an interview and barely being able to speak. Not being able to get any of your accomplishments or abilities out in a timely manner. Each moment of silence feels like a wall of doubt building up in the interviewers mind. But alas, this is the world I live in and this is the world I must succeed in, and this is the world that I will try my damnedest to conquer. So onward I go. Im working on a million and 1 projects at the moment, so I will update you when the time comes. I will update you on my return to my stutter goddess, I'm so excited to see her again.

That Shit Cray

I, Jacquelyn Revere am a severe stutterer. I forget what the percentage for the rank of stuttering is, but I do remember that severe stutterers, stutter on 60-80% of their words, those are a lot of words, and that is a lot of time spent stuttering, and I feel every second of it. I had to take a break from the blog, because stuttering was becoming everything I knew and thought about, and as positive as I try to be about it, stuttering is an up an up and down struggle. I want to continue to share the honesty of what that experience is, but sometimes, I just have to not think about it.

 And now somehow its 2016, I unexpectedly tried to spend 2 years not thinking about stuttering, and during that time I joined Toastmasters, where I thought about it constantly, I quit Toastmasters and I began doing stand up comedy and loved it. LOVED IT.

I know we've talked a bit about how Ive learned to be mostly fluent on stage, it comes with reciting my sets, or scripts, and laser focusing while in the moment on stage, and usually that works for the most part. But in November of 2015, I was asked to do a guest comedy spot on a public access live television show, I did it and stuttered through my entire set. Not one punchline made it out at the right timing, not one anecdote made its way clearly from my mind to my mouth to the mic. None of it. And  I stayed in that moment for a few minutes and my entire body was on fire, I felt flames circling every inch of myself,  Im sure its on youtube somewhere, I was even given a consolation prize of a horrid interview after I balled my eyes out for 20 minutes upstairs in the conference room corner, and I'm sure thats on the web somewhere too. So, I quit, I didn't wanna do stand up anymore, and decided o focus on comedic writing and video production. Youtube and video production peaked my interest and I have begun training and working at the same public access station that I bombed at, every time i see the couples who show I bombed I rush away as quickly as possible, completely embarrassed, and that how I know that my stutter work is not done, and will most likely never be done, and so I am back to document my experience, because 'that shit cray.'

March 8th I stepped back on stage to co-host/produce a comedy show with a friend (Chanel Ali). This was my first time back on stage since November 2015, it was fun, I didn't say much, I didn't tell any jokes, Chanel and I played off each other a bit (she is so supportive), but I'm getting my feet wet again. Hopefully I will be able to tell you about our next show coming up soon.