This might be an interesting story all by itself. A young boy growing up never being able to communicate the thoughts in his head into actual speech. He was barely in preschool when he was first told he was different. He always loved talking to people and wanted to make friends but when he tried to communicate this, the words never came out accurately. Going into preschool  he almost couldn’t say any of the phonetic sounds correctly. He sputtered only sounds rarely actually making words. To all his classmates and teachers he sounded incoherent. They might have thought he was foreign, learning the language for the first time, or they might have thought he was disabled in some way thinking no one can be this bad at something as simple as just talking. He wasn’t any of these things. He was just a boy trying to share some of the wild childish thoughts in his head. He grew up into a man who shares his story in third person to help remind people of the gift they take for granted.

Having a speech impairment makes it so you split into two versions of yourself. The first being what you thought you said. In your mind you know what you tried to say and to you that's what came out. But the other version of you was what you actually said. The worst part of talking with a speech impairment was that you didn’t know you said it wrong until someone said something. Usually along the lines of, What? or say that again? or even sometimes, Sweetie I just can not understand you.

I went to speech therapy during school for most of my life with other kids who usually had trouble with one or two sounds. The common ones being making Rs sound like Ws or the S sound into a SH sound. I was both of those and many others. We went every week for these extra lessons. I would try my hardest to improve. Where they would kinda try. I would try on the reading tests and receive 60% on correct pronunciation. Where they would take the tests and receive  90% with almost no effort. I would find myself stuck in speech for another eight years. Always watching that every year other kids “graduated” out of speech and wouldn’t have to come back for another year. During that time a large amount of resentfulness built up inside me. Some of it towards the program some towards myself. I never showed this anger, instead I used it.

After a couple of years I was fed up going to speech classes. I was tired of being the different kid that had to leave class every other day.  I was just mad at the situation I was in. So I talked. I talked to my parents. I talked to my classmates. I talked during presentations. I talked to any one and every one that would listen to me. I talked to myself at times just to practice. I talked about everything I knew. I talked just to use the  language given to me. I talked for myself but also so eventually others could understand me. The boy that chose to stay quiet now told other people the correct answers. I was trying to change my life.