On #2 familiarity makes the stutter easier to understand. Teaching is fine because the students can get used to it. I fight for it to be labeled a disability so the school will pay for speech therapy. And it sucks and makes life harder. Fighting the fact my son has a severe stutter doesn’t help. It doesn’t make the stutter go away. It’s a brick wall that is just there. There are days it’s too high to scale, days when we can find freedom by digging under and every once in a while we find a door. It sucks to get used to the door and one day waking up and finding that stupid door is sealed shut. Most people don’t need to deal with this brick wall when communicating their thoughts and people who stutter have a built in asshole alert. Sometimes it really sucks to have firsthand experience about how many assholes there are in the world. Sometimes its mind blowingly awesome to connect with a gem of a human that you wouldn’t recognize as such otherwise. By scaling this wall every day my son is turning into a strong person, but it’s not without its bumps and bruises. He didn’t sign up to be a mental gymnast (ha ha, get it? Scaling the wall? Gymnastics? Mental gymnastics? No? Ah well, I thought it was funny). Yes it’s a disability but ultimately you need to decide if it’s a barrier or a prop to use to show off your gymnastics. It’s not an excuse to not live your life. It’s just there. You need to write your own story. What’s your metaphor?