The Problem by Wilson Wuchen, Class of 2018

“Who can tell me what the answer of this question is?”
I raise my hand and the teacher calls on me. I went on to answer the question. Trying to say the answer out loud, I encounter a problem, a problem that I had multiple times in the past.
“Can you read this sentence for me?”
“The cat ate the food because be- be- because she was hungry.” I tried to read.
I read a couple more sentences until the end of my one on one with my speech teacher when she told me about my progress.
“Sorry to upset you, but we’ve been working on this for half of the year and you don’t seem to be improving at all.”
After the speech class, my mom was worried that I wouldn’t fit in later in my life because of my stuttering problem. She tried different methods such as having me read a chapter of a book aloud before I went to sleep, which didn’t really help. Then, she tried to ask around about who could help me. Eventually she couldn’t find anyone that could help and I was forced to fix the problem myself.
I was disappointed and I thought I would live on with my life always stuttering. I would avoid conversations whenever possible so I didn’t have to talk, stutter and embarrass myself. But soon, I learnt to embrace it. Once I got to middle school, I eventually started to stutter less and less. Although it’s gotten tremendously better, I wish I could say my stuttering is gone, but sadly, that’s not the case.
One thing that has improved for me is the volume of my voice. Because I had to always read aloud books, and I had to have people understand a little bit of what I said, the volume of my voice increased little by little. Now my volume is to the point that even if I talk in a normal volume and I’m in a conversation, many people could easily eavesdrop of it.
Woodrow Wilson once said, “The only use of an obstacle is to overcome. All that an obstacle does with brave men is, not to frighten them, but to challenge them.” Like Woodrow Wilson said, I didn’t just give up when there were ‘no solutions’ left. I persevered and continued on trying to fix it and never giving up. Because of this, I no longer stutter as much as I used to because I continued trying.