A Blessing in Disguise by Emily-Keyes

A Blessing in Disguise by Emily-Keyes - February 2017 Scholarship Essay

As I stand in front of the church as a lector, hundreds of pairs of eyes glare up at me daring me to mispronounce a word. I frantically ponder if my apraxia will randomly kick back in. I flash back to kindergarten…
Looking up at my lunch lady, I repeated the question, “May I have a sponge?” Yet, every time I repeated it, her face twisted farther into a state of confusion. On the verge of tears, my kindergarten self pondered why she could not understand me. In my mind, I could perfectly pronounce each word without any struggle. In reality, I was failing.
Yes, I know what you are thinking: little kids have trouble speaking. But, my case was different. Most toddlers start to talk from eighteen to twenty-four months old. At four years old, I still could not talk. Worried sick, my parents wondered if I would ever gain the ability to talk. Going from doctor to doctor, my mom kept repeating the same questions, such as “Is this condition permanent for Emily-Keyes?” and “Will she ever be able to talk?”
After loads of research and several trips to different doctors, my mom narrowed it down – I had a condition called Childhood apraxia of speech. Basically, it is a motor speech disorder that gave me trouble when saying words, syllables, and sounds. I always knew what I wanted to say, but my brain failed to direct the muscle movements needed to say those words.
As a kid, this made no sense to me. All my friends could talk, and I could not. While my friends went to fun, nonchalant speech lessons at my elementary school, St. Jude, I went off to Woodland Elementary to see Mrs. B, my speech teacher. I absolutely dreaded the long, aggravating speech lessons with Mrs. B.
But, every lesson led to an inch of progress. I forced myself to practice outside of the lessons with the aid of my speech notecards. I can still picture them: little, pink, laminated cards all strung together on a small, metal ring. On each notecard, I would write down whatever consonant or vowel I was currently working on, along with how to pronounce it.
After years of long hours of speech lessons and training my muscles to pronounce words correctly, those inches added up to feet, and the feet added up to yards. And, I eventually learned how to speak without any hiccups.
I stopped going to speech lessons a long time ago. But, every now and then, words will fly out of my mouth at a mile a minute, and I hear the phrase, “Stop mumbling, Emily-Keyes” from my mom. I cannot stand that phrase: it reminds me of what once held me back. So, in those moments, I take a deep breath, unclench my fists, and speak slower. The words come out easily and dance across the crisp air. Whenever this happens, I always have a mini epiphany of all that I have overcome.
As a child, I saw having apraxia as a nuisance, and not until recently did I realize that it is a blessing. The effort and time I put into learning how to talk with this disorder gave me two very important qualities: work ethic and determination. Without apraxia, I would have never learned how highly I need to value those qualities and how far they would get me in life.
About a year or two ago, I started lectoring at my church. Every time I get up in front of the church, I freeze for a second. Yet, I manage to confidently flow through the readings in Mass, without mangling a single word. How do I do it? I do it with the two skills that battling apraxia gave me: my work ethic and determination.