Are You Ignorant or Are You Just A Bully to Stutterers?
I’ve given people nothing but the benefit of the doubt when it comes to not understanding my dysfluency, but my latest interaction brought this question to the surface
If I had a dollar for every time a stranger, a friend, a bully, or a customer mocked, laughed, or negatively reacted to how I stuttered, I could quit my job right now.
9 times out of 10, I have given people the benefit of the doubt. Most of the time the interaction is just too short for me to have the energy to clap back.
Other times I don’t want to have a teaching moment, knowing I’m probably just talking to a brick wall.
Because only 1% of us in the US have a stutter, statistically it is wildly uncommon to come across in your day-to-day. For that reason, I have become unphased by the reactions I get.
If you don’t come across something you don’t know often, how will you know what is the right way to treat the situation/person?
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But then there are just assholes
Those are the ones who mock you. Those are the ones who thought you were doing some kind of bit and decided to chime in. Like in the same way someone might have broken English and you respond in the same way it was received.
It's people like that who get under my skin because I think to myself, you do know what you’re doing, right?
There it is again though, the fine line between being ignorant and being a mean person.
Now that I am fully into my stuttering journey I am beginning to learn and differentiate what it means to be mean because of incompetence and being mean because you are mean.
My latest encounter had to do with a coworker. The consensus about this person is that they are not very well-liked and get along with very few. Our rapport is fair which is good enough for me for how big our team is.
I was talking to a friend across the way, who knows that I stutter, and I end up stutter out loud to him right as the person in question strolls through us. They look at me, stutter back at me, smile, and walk away.
Immediately I go through the list of actions I can take:
- Get on the defense and say something snarky back to match their energy
- Have a teaching moment
- Ignore them for a while so I can cool off but don’t bother bringing it up
- Assume that they’re just ignorant and let it go
And so I do the latter. I assume that they’re ignorant and I let it go.
As I recanted this story to my friend/coworker, she immediately was on the defense about how this person knew exactly what they were doing and did it because that’s who they are: mean.
This was a surprise to me because so often I give people the benefit of the doubt. Rarely do I even find the time to differentiate whether their actions are rooted in ignorance or their villainy?
The interaction opened the door to go down into the cellar and dig up the archives of the people who knew their intentions and meant to bully me. While the unearthing should make me upset, it has instead left me proud of myself, because my own ignorance of their personality made me the bigger person.
Going forward, it is a question of what steps should I take if I should encounter someone else. It should also make you question what side are you on.
