Why I Don’t Regret My Speech Impediment
How it helped to make me who I am.
The young version of me would stare open mouthed if she heard me say that.
My parents always told me that I was meant to speak Hungarian, which is my dads native language. My ‘S’s and ‘Sh’s were switched, ‘Th’s flat and hard, ‘R’s near impossible. I took years of speech therapy until the lady practically threw her arms in the air to say, “it’s as good as it’s going to get.”
Funny enough, as soon as the speech therapy stopped, my pronunciations became better. The drawback was that it took me half way through middle school to get here.
“The only time you fail is when you fall down and stay down.” — Stephen Richards
Finding Purpose
I remember how depressed I used to get with every crude word sent my way. Many classmates seemed to believe that not being able to speak correctly was directly correlated with not being intelligent.
This ruined my self-esteem, made me a perfectionist in order to prove myself, and I developed severe social anxiety.
Every year on the first day of school, I’d walk to class with a motto. I won’t talk unless my teacher calls on me. Yes, I was that strange kid that only nodded when my classmates spoke to me.
