here's my college essay that i wrote about stuttering. it got me into duke

here's my college essay that i wrote about stuttering. it got me into duke When the recording was done, my camp counselor dragged the cursor over a wriggling patch of sound and snapped the delete button. Then he dragged it over the next patch ... SNAP. Drag … SNAP. Suddenly, I realized. He was editing out my stutter. As drags and snaps inside the rundown sleepaway camp “radioshack” faded behind me, I wondered *Why’d he do that?* I really wanted to ask, but it was a stupid idea because that meant talking again and that meant stuttering again and that couldn’t happen. Middle school was a game. Sometimes I’d magically figure out ways to stuff up my stuttering and win, other times I’d let the secret out. The fear of losing followed me everywhere. But I always stopped myself from wondering if there was something wrong with me: if whenever I spoke to anyone, they couldn’t stand hearing me, wished they could “fix” me like my counselor had, thought I was broken. I tried to block it out, to stop those lurking thoughts from materializing. But every stutter was a failure that poked holes in my only defense. As a last resort to protect my artificial reality, I talked less and less, erasing myself into silence. \*\*\* The more you don’t want to stutter, the more you do. It’s like a Chinese finger trap. Hating and resisting stuttering fuels a vicious cycle. I spent years locked in by vocal tension. But then, speech therapy taught me how to break the cycle: to stop wanting to hide my stutter. I practiced breaking out of silence. I used speech exercises to counteract “avoidance behavior,” or bad habits I used to hide my stuttering. A tally counter clunked around my pocket while walking to class. I forced myself to raise my hand. Staring down the rollercoaster drop, I stuttered, reached into my pocket, and clicked the counter. I was tracking how many times I stuttered *on purpose*. I was training my subconscious to believe stuttering was so okay that I’d even *choose* to do it. \*\*\* Every second I talk, I dig inside my subconscious to neutralize the hardwired instincts telling me I can’t stutter. I summon the courage not to care if people think I’m broken. It’s exhausting. I still stutter, but with a calm and confidence that frees me to joke with friends, share my math strategy, order my pizza. But now, I’ll take it a step further. I am who I am today not in spite of stuttering, but *thanks* to stuttering. Every word is so hard won that I have to make it mean something. There’s a new value to speaking in Socratic seminars and understanding people’s differences. Witnessing how curses become blessings, I embrace any challenge as an opportunity to grow stronger. This new perspective showed me that stuttering is bigger than just my story. Ignorance and societal pressure not to stutter are the real culprits of the Chinese-finger-trap-phenomenon. If everyone knew that stuttering isn’t to be laughed at, hidden, or fixed, then 75 million people wouldn’t be living trapped by fear. Hear Me Out is my initiative to make that happen. I’ve met with school speech therapists and given 17 presentations on stuttering. I was a keynote speaker at the American Institute for Stuttering Gala where I met stutterers who had been inspired by my presentation videos. One started her own high school activism campaign. Seeing others join the cause gives me hope that my mission can happen. I used to fantasize about my stutter magically disappearing, just like my dad’s had. That ashamed boy in the radioshack was blindly waiting until he could start living freely. I want to go back in time with my slidedeck; talk to him, fearlessly; show him how stuttering will be the best thing that’s ever happened to him; so he knows that what he has to say is too important to let anything stop him.