The truly happy and successful people in this world view stress as a challenge instead of a threat

The truly happy and successful people in this world view stress as a challenge instead of a threat I wish I wasn't like this. But I am. First post here so bear with me. I've had a slight stutter/stammer since as long as I can remember. I guess I had a part mental breakdown, part mental breakthrough today. It's what led me to search after two years on Reddit for a stuttering related sub. By all accounts I have a great life. I'm good looking. I just graduated this year from one of the country's best universities with honors. I have a big social circle, from college and from home. I'm turning 22 on Sunday. I'm reasonably fit, going from scrawny in high school to much more built now. I'm tall. I've had a long term serious relationship with a gorgeous girl, and I experienced the college hook up culture to the fullest. I've seen things and been places few people have. I've lived abroad. I have an internship with a really cool tech startup in a major city. I have turned down full-time offers and have more interviews lined up including tomorrow at a marketing agency and next week at a financial institution. Life isn't bad. And I stutter. Mildly. Enough to the point where I wrote my college entrance essays about it, but mild in that not everyone I come into contact with notices. I've always felt like my stutter goes in "cycles" as I call them; months of little to no noticing of it by myself, to a more pronounced time period where it comes back again for a bit. I saw speech therapists as a child and loathed them and resented the pathologists. I was involved in a fMRI study about stutterers at my college only to stop halfway through. It made me on a consistent basis have to acknowledge I stutter. I didn't like that. In how I view myself, I want to pretend that I don't stutter. To put it as far out of mind as possible and not have any of my self-image be associated with it. Maybe that's where this wave of emotions came from today; I pushed the sea back farther and farther until it broke and crashed back hard to shore. The truly happy and successful people in this world view stress as a challenge instead of a threat. It's a quote I've heard recently at work. When you view something as a threat, it already has done it's harm. Most of what the world looks like comes from our perception of it. But if you look at a stressful situation as a challenge, there's the possibility to overcome it and profit from it. I'm going to choose to see my stuttering in that light. As a challenge. As something that not everyone has to deal with, but I do. And I don't think I'm going to wake up tomorrow and it magically have disappeared. I don't think I can pray it away. It's here for the time being. It isn't as bad as others', because I can function quite well socially. Embarrassing times are more limited now than in the past, they don't hold as much weight, and I fight through them easier. The iceberg of anxiety, billowing under the surface as clear as day to me but hidden to most, holds next to no grip over my actions anymore. If I want to speak, I speak. If I stutter, I still chose to spoke. So be it. I think a lot of the anger I've felt in recent months has been a response to a lessening ability to empathize with others. A form of projecting my own lack of empathy towards myself onto other people; well shit, they don't even stutter! Fuck them and their problems, if I didn't stutter of course I could do that! But that's causing stress in me. It isn't healthy. And not everyone hates me for my stutter. I don't think anyone does when I look at it rationally. Stuttering is polarizing in people; there is no middle ground. It's fuck yes or fuck no when it comes to friends and social relationships. I've come to realize that I don't have to take total 100% responsibility for whether someone else likes me or doesn't, because I don't have 100% control over that. But I can control my reactions to situations. And I will control my reaction to my stuttering, even as it gets better as it has my entire young adult life. It's a challenge, not a threat. It neither holds me back nor pushes me up. It's simply there. And I'm here. I should be grateful for where I am in my life. Not because I got lucky, but because I did fight through this challenge. If it was a threat, it would have killed me a long time ago. But it hasn't; it won't. I don't have to love my stuttering. But I do have to face it, in some respect. I think I'm better now realizing that. Cheers everyone.