A Thrilling Tale About Overcoming All Odds...

I wasn't always the confident, swaggering, ego that you see before you today. There was a time in my life that I couldn't communicate well enough to get my team to say Five Words in under two minutes by only speaking five words to them (In your face Bre). In point of fact, it used to be really hard for me just to speak five words in under two minutes. I had a speech impediment.

My mom used to tell me that I couldn't speak for the first five years of my life, so I was making up for it the rest of the time. When I was little I used to stutter. It isn't exactly what you think of normally when you hear that some one s-s-s-stutters. I could say my S's and my P's. But I would talk disjointed and in fragments. Half sentences, one or two random words, and broken ideas... It was so frustrating to talk to people that most of the time I just didn't.

I ended up having to go to a doctor. My parents were starting to worry at this point that I was like savant or something. The doctor told my parents it was a good news, bad news thing. The good news was that I was exceptionally bright for my age. I was very alert of my environment and had good cognitive skills, but I thought so fast that my mouth couldn't keep up with my brain. So I would start a sentence and in my head say three. So the sentence would be, "Mom can I... because the cat has darker fur." But in my head I had said a whole paragraph. And if I tried to correct it I would end up just starting the sentence over and over because I would get lost. I was having all these new thoughts and emotions and having them so fast I couldn't articulate them.

The way to fix it was probably more embarrassing than stuttering. I had to speak very very slowly and simply. I worked with a doctor once a week with flash cards and toys like the weird movies where the kids were government experiments or possessed by aliens. The office had the mirror window and everything, so my parents and the CIA could watch the progress. At home I would go to my Mom and she would stop me and say, "Okay Luc, think about it, and tell me what you want to say." So that was suppose to be a reminder for me to complete the thought in my head and then go over it again and say it slowly in the most simple words I could find. So now instead of being disjointed, I appeared "Slow". I began to speed things up eventually.

Now I talk all the time. But I can't say that the "think before you speak" thing ever stuck.
(This post inspired by PostSecret.com) Pictured left.