meeting another female stutterer

so ive always hated therapists. for lots of reasons. but thats another post. so i had this really cool experience not too long ago...jill told me about this stuttering workshop presented by a lady who stutters and is also an slp. i wanted to go but i wasnt sure. jill convinced me to go- she thought itd be beneficial. so i signed up to go. it was on a friday, dec. 7. thursday night i almost backed out, but i found myself driving to savannah the next morning anyway. so i get there and feel sick walking into a room full of speech therapists. jill promised me i wouldnt have to talk, just sit and listen. yeah i wasnt in there 3 minutes and i had to speak to the whole group. awesome. the speaker, marilee, asked if anyone was not a speech therapist. i raised my hand. she asked what i did. uh....so i stuttered away. of course she knew then, so did everyone else. well good. at least we got that out of the way. she came up to me at the first break and pulled a chair up so she could sit while speaking to me. she asked if i was understanding everything, since some of it was "slp talk." i told her i was good, and what i wasnt sure of jill helped me with. we talked a little about teaching and that was that. i enjoyed the conference. mainly because i liked listening to marilee speak and it was the neatest experience to meet another female who stutters (or just another person that stutters, for that matter). were outnumbered 4 to 1, so it was really cool. i went up to her after the conference and told her i enjoyed it and that she was the first female stutterer i had ever met. she told me if i wasnt in a hurry to hang around and chat while she packed up. i ended up staying for about 45 minutes, up until she had to leave to catch her flight back to ohio. i left the conference with an indescribable feeling, simply because of meeting marilee. and it was even more awesome because she was successful and doing what she loved and speaking for a living, all while stuttering. i was quite impressed, especially when there were technical difficulties with the sound system and the hotel staff who were supposed to help her were very rude and inconsiderate. she didnt back down. she didnt just let it go. she was assertive and said what she needed to say and demanded respect, eventually getting the sound system problem fixed. i really admired that because i would have just shrugged and walked away, or at best gotten someone else to speak for me. also, it was encouraging because marilee spoke about her husband, and i always wonder if theres guys out there who would want to marry a stutterer. so now i know theres at least one. ha! hopefully theres more, preferably a little younger. :) anyway, meeting marilee was something that i will never forget. im glad jill told me about it and im glad i didnt punk out.