“There’s always that question,” Koroll tells me. “If you had a magic pill, would you take it? And for me, the answer is no.”

The NSA, which started as a tiny cohort in San Francisco in 1977 as the National Stuttering Project (the name changed in 2000), holds a conference every year. It’s a flurry of research presentations; self-esteem workshops; open mics, where people who stutter take the stage to share stories and insights; and social events.

The organization also has more than 100 chapters across the United States that meet once or twice a month. The leaders must use specific words to open and close the meetings, but otherwise, they’re largely freeform. Anyone who stutters, or who has an interest in stuttering (speech-language pathology students often attend), is welcome. The organization has roughly 20,000 names on their mailing list, and about 700 to 900 people have attended their annual conference in recent years.

It’s a small number, though, compared to the number of stutterers in the country: Approximately 1 percent of the population stutters, or around 3 million Americans. Lee Reeves, the former chairman of the NSA, says it’s a question he has heard often: “Where are all the stutterers?”

Koroll and Reeves both believe that stigma is one reason why many people are hesitant to join an organized community of stutterers. “It’s not something they’re proud of or want to be associated with,” Reeves says. Many people I talked with told me they knew someone else who stuttered growing up, yet studiously avoided the subject of their shared trait whenever they spoke.

In contrast to this tendency in stutterers to avoid the topic, organizations like the NSA base their missions on a simple idea: Witnessing each other’s speech and then talking about it openly can have a powerful emotional effect.

“I think I only said my name at my first NSA chapter meeting, right at the beginning,” Michael Turner, a filmmaker based in Portland who attended his first NSA conference last year, told me. “And I heard everyone else say their names too, and everyone stuttered on them, and I left floating in a cloud.”

And as the NSA—which calls itself “the world’s largest self-help group for people who stutter”— gains prominence within the field of speech-language pathology, some people want to carry this idea of acceptance to its logical conclusion: a future where stuttering is no longer a pathology at all, just another way of speaking.

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Most stutterers are familiar with the experience of being told to slow down, to breathe, to try this or that trick—meditation, speaking in a singsong voice, reciting poetry à la James Earl Jones or Joe Biden (both stutterers).

About 65–75 percent of children who develop a stutter see it disappear within a couple years. Some of them grow out of it on their own, and others benefit from early-intervention speech therapy. But after adolescence, a stutter will likely stick around for life. Some people who stutter can erase stuttering from their speech almost entirely, but the disappearance of visible disfluencies does not mean that they are cured—it just means they have to consistently work to keep the stutter under wraps.