Although stuttering might make you think of that nervous kid in the back of class, stuttering actually has little to do with nervousness at all. While people who don’t typically stutter might stutter when they’re nervous, for the more than 3 million people in the United States who have the communicative disorder, the precise cause of stuttering is not known.

With a lot of myths working against them, people who stutter have a few things they’d like to clear up. The Mighty worked with the National Stuttering Association to find out what people who stutter want others to know.

Here’s what they had to say:

1. “We are perfectly capable of speaking for ourselves and don’t need other people to finish our sentences for us.” — Austin Garcia