I write this as a person who st-st-st-stutters. I've had a stutter since I first began to talk. Although I have spent countless hours researching stuttering, I'm still not sure what to think about my speech disfluency. The cause of stuttering is unknown; no cure exists. The puzzle of stuttering has profoundly affected my life and continues to impact me daily. Each day, often every sentence, I stutter.
I have heard many conversations about disabilities and a lot about the hardships of living with a physical challenge (which may be expressed psychologically, as with mental illnesses). However, I have not heard much discussion about the responsibility each person has with respect to disabilities. By responsibility, I mean the awareness to take a step back and say: \Why do I feel this way toward people with disabilities?"" With time, some people may realize that the discomfort and lack of acceptance for disabilities'and the individuals who have them'is a result of one's inability to deal with his or her own unresolved issues.
Because of my stutter, I know many people have difficulty with silence, patience, atypical behavior, eye contact and respect. Let us examine patience more closely. In our modern world, especially in the United States, people are impatient. They want things now. For example, people are often in such a hurry that they don't let their friends finish a thought. Do you notice how it can be difficult to finish a sentence without someone interrupting you? When I stutter, people take the ""now"" principle and project it onto me, often finishing my sentences or becoming irritated with my disfluent speech.
Some of my most difficult speaking situations are talking in class, ordering food, meeting new people and saying something of significance that is usually said in a fluent manner. For example, no matter how funny the punch line of a joke, if I stutter it loses its power'and very few people, if any, laugh. Another challenging moment is talking with people I don't know at bars. ""You must be really drunk,"" people sometimes say (which is not the case, as most stutterers who are drunk speak fluently). Although I am self-confident, I have never become used to hearing this.
Luckily, people are willing to listen to me talk about stuttering. However, many people are not as fortunate to have a cooperative audience. Society considers some disabilities acceptable, while others are looked down upon. Stuttering tends to be one of the taboo disabilities, which is why the families of many stutterers rarely, if ever, talk about stuttering.
Further down on the spectrum of ""inappropriate"" disabilities are mental illnesses. In general, our society is a long way from beginning to accept and understand people with mental illnesses. Many people cannot accept and come to terms with their own problems, let alone something as life altering as a mental illness.
Disrespect for others exhibits a lack of self-respect. Some people have difficulty with my stutter'not because of who I am, but because of who they are. They project their own beliefs and expectations, their worldview, onto me. A lack of impatience towards a person who stutters, therefore, does not show that something is inherently wrong with stuttering, but that listeners project their own impatience with themselves onto the stutterer. The saying goes, ""You can only hate what you hate about yourself.""
The lack of respect, and consequently responsibility, for physically and mentally challenged individuals exists to a large extent because most people have not given much time and energy into understanding the challenges of people who live with disabilities. People have the responsibility to examine who they are so that they do not project their own distastes onto the challenged, and in the process, fool themselves into thinking that something is wrong with disabilities and the individuals who have them.
