remain until I had regained my strength.

My affliction was taking all my energy, sapping my strength,
deadening my mental faculties, and placing me at a hopeless
disadvantage in every way. I could do nothing that other people
did. I appeared unnatural. I was nervous, irritable, despondent.
This despondency now brought about a peculiar condition. I began
to believe that everyone was more or less an enemy of mine. And
still worse, I came to believe that I was an enemy of myself,
which feeling threw me into despair, the depths of which I do not
wish to recall, even now.

I was not only miserably unhappy myself, I made everyone else
around me unhappy, although I did it, not intentionally, but
because my affliction had caused me to lose control of myself.

In this condition, my nerves were strained to the breaking point
all day long, and many a night I can remember crying myself to
sleep--crying purely to relieve that stored-up nervous tension,
and f ailing off to sleep as a result of exhaustion.

As I said before, there were periods of grace when the trouble
seemed almost to vanish and I would be delighted to believe that
perhaps it was gone forever--happy hope! But it was but a
delusion, a mirage in the distance, a new road to lead me astray.
The affliction always returned, as every stammerer knows--returned
worse than before. All the hopes that I would outgrow my trouble,
were found to be false hopes. For me, there was no such thing as
outgrowing it and I have since discovered that after the age of
six only one-fifth of one per cent. ever outgrow the trouble.