My 7-year-old self sat all alone in a cluttered, white room inside Cedar Heights Elementary, surrounded by shelves filled with board games and toys. While looking down at my chair and dangling my tiny feet, a woman walked into the room carrying a deck of cards with her.
She told me that we’re going to spend the next hour or so playing Go Fish.
Initially, I didn’t really question why this woman took me out of my classroom and brought me there. I was just happy that I got to miss learning about subtraction in favor of playing games.
Little did I know at the time, this woman actually had a hidden motive behind this simple card game.
Earlier, my teacher had requested for me to see the school’s speech therapist after noticing that I struggled with a lisp. More specifically, I had an incredibly hard
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I figured as long as people knew what I was talking about, why would it matter how pronounced certain words?
The effect did eventually start to wear on me, though, and after a couple months of speech therapy, I received a certificate stating that I successfully completed my sessions, smiley face stickers and all.
However, that didn’t last long. Only a couple weeks later, I quickly forgot how to properly enunciate, and my speech patterns were just like before. Despite my teacher’s annoyance, I really didn’t mind this at all, and the rest of the world around me didn’t seem to care either.
Lisps aren’t very uncommon with small children who are just learning how to speak, so if anything, having a lisp was just another cute, childish quirk that I had at the time.
That started fading away almost immediately when I first started going to junior high. The cuteness factor of having a lisp now seemed dorky, and for a good duration of junior high, I had face different peoples in my classes who would ask me, “Why do you talk like that? Don’t you know how to