I struggle to comfortably use the term “selective” mutism, but as I don’t have any physical inability to speak it’s the only fitting word. From about 2nd grade until I entered middle school, I didn’t speak. At all. I was terrified, I had been bullied, neglected, and told to shut up so frequently by my mother and kids at school, so I stopped talking. It quickly went from me not wanting to talk, to me being scared to talk because I knew it was worthless anyway, why would I want to get yelled at for talking? I couldn’t bring myself to talk for many years, but I’m 22 now and I’ve been talking again since sixth grade. The amount of time I spent not speaking had big impacts on my speech, mainly a massive stutter and the introduction of vocal tics to my already severe Tourette’s. Well, I’ve stopped talking again. Slowly over the past year, my husband has made me less and less confident in speaking. He almost always talks over me, cuts me off, or gets extremely annoyed that I’m talking to him. About a week ago it got really bad, he kept getting mad at me for wanting to talk to him when he was trying to talk to other people on Teamspeak, which he’d been doing the whole week already. I just wanted to talk to my husband, who I love. He’s made it very clear that he doesn’t want to hear anything I have to say. At this point, I’m pretty certain he doesn’t really love me at all... I haven’t spoken a word again since last Tuesday, I’ve been too scared to speak lest he chews my head off for it. I don’t know what to do anymore... I don’t have any friends either, no one I can talk to and ask for help. I just want to have someone who doesn’t think I’m annoying... the worst part is, much like my family when I was a child, he hasn’t noticed at all that I haven’t been talking. I’m not even sure he’d notice if I just disappeared one day...