Hey, let me return the favor and thank you for being one of the few who completely get it and even reaches out in support. It really helps! I do wish that stutter was treated as a disability. Not to get us a "free ride" or some kind of material benefit but to help the society realize that: - just like a person with a broken leg cannot dance (which everybody understands) we cannot talk like other people (which many healthy people have difficulty understanding) - that talking is such an important element in life (which again very few people realize) - and that it is not a "cosmetic" issue, that stutter affects us more than what meets the eye, i.e. teachers, parents, employers etc need to be educated how to deal with it. At 47 I am able to control my stutter much better but I also realize better how my life long stutter affected my way of breathing, social interaction, even my way of thinking and many choices most people don't have to make. It bothers me greatly that every now and then somebody in this forum mentiones suicide as a solution he or she is considering. It shows that stutter is still terribly misunderstood by most non-stutterers, even highly educated people, leaving many stutterers out in the cold. Unless stutter is widely recognized as a disability (even from school age) this won't change.