I am 40, but I still feel like a child

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Olga

Olga Bednarski opens up about the identity she had built for herself as someone who stammers, and how she managed to break through the feelings of suppression to find authenticity.

For a very long time, I felt like a child pretending to be an adult.

I remember being in my twenties and looking at other adults as though they belonged to a world I hadn't fully entered yet. They seemed grounded in themselves. Natural. They made phone calls without hesitation, spoke freely, disagreed without collapsing into guilt afterwards. They moved through life with an unspoken sense of permission.

And then there was me. Even as an adult woman, I still felt like a little girl quietly asking for approval.

Can I say this?
Can I do this?
Is this okay?
Am I allowed?

At the time, I thought it was simply fear of speaking. But over the years, I began to see something deeper. This wasn't only about speech. It was about my identity. Identity quietly shapes everything — how we speak, what we believe we are allowed to do, how much space we take up in the world, and how we allow others to treat us. It becomes an invisible structure we live inside without even realising it.

And mine was built around smallness.

It (stammering) shapes how we relate to ourselves, our emotions, our needs, our bodies and our sense of presence in the world.

I didn't fully trust myself — not with decisions, not with my desires, and certainly not with my expression. Other people seemed more 'adult' than me, more legitimate somehow. I felt emotionally small inside, even though another part of me knew I wasn't small at all.

That inner contradiction became one of the strangest and most painful experiences of my life.

For years, I carried a strange image inside me: a whale wearing a nappy.

It sounds absurd, but emotionally it captured exactly how I felt. Inside, I felt enormous — deep, perceptive, emotionally alive, full of intensity, creativity and potential. But outwardly, I felt constricted, as though something vast had been compressed into a shape far too small for it.

I think many people who stammer might know this feeling more intimately than they realise.

Stammering is rarely just about speech. It often reflects an identity organised around fear, anticipation, self-monitoring, shame and hypervigilance — a stammering identity built from internal assumptions about who we are allowed to be. It shapes how we relate to ourselves, our emotions, our needs, our bodies and our sense of presence in the world.

At least that was true for me.

I became highly skilled at monitoring myself and managing other people's emotional comfort. I was afraid of upsetting anyone, disappointing anyone, or being seen as 'too much'. If someone crossed my boundaries, I often wouldn't respond. I would shrink inwardly and tell myself, "It's okay… just wait it out".

I became very good at enduring myself.

At adapting.
At suppressing.
At making myself smaller and quieter.

And slowly, I began confusing those survival patterns with who I was.

Looking back now, I can see how much of my life was lived from my head — thinking, analysing, anticipating, controlling. But life does not truly happen in the head. Feelings do not live there either. Feelings live in the body. Connection lives in the body. Growth lives there too. 

When we spend years suppressing emotion — fear, anger, spontaneity, desire, visibility — something inside us stops developing naturally. We grow older physically, but psychologically we may still feel young, uncertain or dependent.

Not because we are incapable but because our identity is still organised around protection rather than self-trust.

For me, this affected everything: relationships, boundaries, visibility, work, even my ability to relax into life. There was always this haunting feeling that I needed permission to exist fully.

Permission & authenticity

Eventually, the mismatch became too magnified to ignore. I had experiences and travels that expanded me and revealed how much more existed inside me than the identity I had been living from. The old version of myself began to feel painfully tight — like clothes I had long outgrown.

That was when I realised something that changed everything: nobody was coming to authorise me. There was no invisible authority figure above me who would finally arrive and say:

“You are ready now.
You may speak.
You may be seen.
You may become fully yourself.”

That permission had to come from me.

Strangely, that realisation was both uncomfortable and liberating. It felt as though I was removing an old, tight, outgrown costume that no longer belonged to me.

So, I began observing myself differently.

For years, I thought healing meant becoming flawlessly fluent. But what I was really starving for was permission to exist.

How would I move through life if I no longer saw myself as small? How would I speak? How would I breathe? How would I respond? What would my posture feel like? What would it feel like to stop bending myself into acceptable shapes?

Slowly, I began to see something clearly: healing was not about becoming someone else.

It was about shedding the identity that had been quietly running my life.

The fear.
The shrinking.
The self-suppression.
The emotional hiding.

Underneath all of that, there was already a whole person there.

Psychological adulthood, as I understand it now, is not about perfection or loud extraversion. It is not about performing certainty. It is about authenticity — remaining connected to yourself instead of abandoning yourself to be accepted. It is about allowing yourself to exist honestly, accepting that not everyone will understand you or approve of you.

I think this is what many people are truly starving for underneath speech anxiety.

Not perfect speech.

But connection.
Belonging.
Safety.
Flow.

The feeling of being fully welcome in the world as themselves.

For years, I thought healing meant becoming flawlessly fluent. But what I was really starving for was permission to exist.

To take a full breath of air and savour it. To keep my head up without shrinking. To feel at home in this world. To find inner peace and reconciliation with myself, other people, and life itself. To stop asking invisible authority figures whether I was allowed to take up space.

If you recognise yourself in this, perhaps this is your reminder too:

Nobody else can give us that permission because identity is the structure underneath everything. Perhaps identity itself is not fixed, but more like a veil — something that can be loosened and reshaped when it no longer aligns with the life we want to live.

Slowly. Gently. One step at a time.

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