I don't know, but I often bite my tongue to keep from doing so. What I do know is saccharine sympathy makes me feel as if there is less to me than I know there is. I do not want pity. I do not want sympathy. Worse yet, looking at it from a larger social perspective, when society gets away with treating people with disabilities as objects worthy only of sympathy, society can forego making the changes necessary to move people with disabilities into the mainstream.
Sympathy is certainly easier and cheaper to offer than accommodation.
No one can deny a good dose of sympathy can be pleasant. But it's a luxury people with disabilities cannot afford. Even when we are depressed and feeling confined by our disabilities, we must recognize that sympathy relegates us to the back of the bus. And the therapy that follows is more difficult yet, for it requires that a person move past anger and through the swamp of self-pity. Sadly, too many of us remain lost there for the remainder of our lives.