Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

President Lincoln

First, let me get one thing straight.  I understand that I’m far from a fool, but I AM VERY self conscious about my speech.  See? I’ve lived with a speech challenge my ENTIRE life and it often gets the better of me.  When I was a child, I actually stuttered; repeating the same words over and over.  And when you have people in your life who don’t always understand that saying:
Slow down and think about what you want to say
actually make things worse it can be quite challenging to continue carrying on a conversation.

Sometime during my high school career, my speech pattern morphed into a new challenge, where I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t get the words out.

It’s been that way to this day.

You know how they say when one muscle atrophies, another will pick up the slack?  It’s that way with my eyesight, I am so far nearsighted that when I lay in bed at night , I can hardly see my electric clock which is directly in front of me.  What does that have to do with the above example?  Well hold on, I’m getting there.  Here it is:
I’ve been writing almost my entire life.  And one of the points I attempt to get across is that I am generally a quiet person, tending to listen more than speak.  I’m somewhat worried, (all though on a deep conceptual level I certainly understand that I shouldn’t be) that my challenge will arise when I don’t want it to, that I won’t be able to articulate what I want to say.  When writing, there is NO fear of that.  It’s one of the reasons I took up writing.

I wanted to show that I REALLY did have something intellectual to say.  There have been people in my past, acquaintances at school who would sometimes single me out because I was an easy target.  I wanted to prove to those who chose to believe because I had this speech challenge that I wasn’t intellectually challenged.  So when I started writing, I found a voice, I found another way to speak and I started sharing some of what I was writing.  SOME of the my classmates came around.  They saw that I REALLY did have something to say, that I wasn’t just remaining silent anymore, that I found another outlet to speak.  And those same classmates became friends.  They wanted to see what I wrote next.

Of course there were those people who didn’t see beyond my outward appearance, my speech impediment; but because I now had a new outlet those classmates that attempted continued harassment fell on deaf ears.  Writing started out for me as a way to speak without fear of a stutter and became a lifelong love, a gift I will never forsake again.

When, several years after high school I joined a writer’s group I was fond of saying that I let my writing do my talking for me.  I still do.  I’m not silent anymore and I understand that I’m not a fool.

How do you express yourself?

Be Happy!  Be Well!  Be Positive!
Blessings to you.
—
Chris