We sometimes follow a career that isn't something we really want to do, for various reasons. Maybe the career we truly want wasn't feasible to do at the time. Maybe at the time, we truly didn’t know what we wanted to do. Or for stutterers, maybe we thought the career we wanted involved too much speaking and we shied away from it.
If you don’t have passion for a career, it’s doomed. In order to bloom in a certain field, you have to want to do things like taking the extra step, exploring ways to do things better, and network with other people in the field. But when you’re disinterested in a career and are simply doing it for the money, you do almost none of those things, and you’re just slaving away at something that is, in a way, slowly killing you. Because if you don’t feel alive doing something, then you’re effectively slowly dying. In a passionless career, you don’t take the extra step, managers can tell you’re not excited about the career, and you probably won’t see any advancement. Managers advance people who appear to enjoy their work, and demonstrate that they can lead other people effectively in the field.
Now I understand that many stutterers don’t pursue a career they would love because it involves a lot of speaking. But to give up pursuing that career would be a tragedy because you’d be giving up on something that makes you excited and want to wake up to in the morning. As I said above, choosing instead something that you have no interest in is just going to slowly hack away at your happiness and well-being If it’s not feasible to pursue your true love, at least keep it up on the side. It will be a lifeline that will sustain you while you trudge through your crappy job that you can hopefully one day be rid of.
When Ed Sheeran spoke at AIS, he left a very simple message: Don’t focus on your stutter and just be yourself - which by extension means follow your passions and interests (2m 40sec in the below clip). In the clip, he’s actually directing his message to kids, but it still left an impact on me for its simplicity and general utilitarianism. His message is like a simple compass that a stutterer can follow through all the chaos a stutterer experiences during their life - the worries, the anxieties, the confusion. I think as long as you pursue your true passions, you’ll end up in a place in life that, when you look back, you’ll be satisfied with.
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