Choppy sentences. The repetition of words caused Impatient sighs to fill up the room as my mouth fought to catch up with my head.  Resulting in redundant syllables. I had a stutter, a bad stutter.

The knowing feeling that everyone in the room has grown impatient with your lack of ability to speak, is painfully embarrassing.  

The looks that I was receiving grew more impatient as my mouth kept opening and closing like a fish out of water stuck on a hook.  I started to panic. I never fancied the oh-so-obvious eye roll or the huffs of air that expressed their objections to my talking.  

I had to do take action.  

For months, I would lock myself away in my room to read my favorite book of poems, “The Light In The Attic”.  I distinctly remember sitting in my room, wanting those words to come out of my mouth more than anything. My actions imitated ones of a toddler perfectly as I whined in frustration due to the lack of words my mouth was forming.  As my eyes would dart across the page with such rapid speeds, my mouth stumbled to keep up with my sponge of a brain.  

I was a prisoner of my own mind trapped in a cell of hyper thinking.  When after months of rivers of anger and frustration poured from my tired, dull eyes, something amazing happened.  

I finished the poem.

My mouth, for once in my life, caught up with the expeditious like a sponge in my head.

I was no longer trapped, bound by chains caused by my own pressure of speech.  

I was free.

When the relief washed over me like a cool shower on a scalding hot day, I wanted to communicate in every possible way that I could.  While other children had toys, imaginary friends, or superheroes as their blanket of protection, I had my books and I had my words.  

As I became older, I possessed a firm grasp on the knowledge of language.  I would spend my free time hunched over my desk, shoveling words into my mouth to exhale later with absolute perfection.  To this day, I still stutter when I get nervous, but it never makes me feel linguistically incompetent like it once did because I have my books and have my words.

My goal is to travel the world writing stories in black and white, painting colorful images in people's minds of what I have encountered.  I want my mother tongue to taste the stories of other languages and feel the culture. I want to be able to communicate so intelligently, so intricately that my stutter will be overlooked by not only others, but myself too.   

I now know that my love for languages and understanding the world is no longer just a hobby.  This will be my career. The amount of dedication and passion I will put into my work is something that will be apparent.  Just like my poem book once was, this college, this dream, will be my new blanket of protection.