I’ve told very few people in my life about this. I had a terrible lisp, and for various reasons I didn’t get into speech therapy until 7th grade.

I don’t know about your middle school experience, but I’d put 7th grade among the worst years of my life *without* speech therapy. https://twitter.com/cornfedcurler/status/1297217770204082176

One of the first things they do is test to find out if you’re struggling because you’re “slow.” The implication, of course, is “can’t talk right = dumb.” So you get to endure a battery of fairly demeaning vocabulary tests that really add to the milieu of pubescent angst.

Because you didn’t enter middle school with an IEP (Individual Education Plan for those of you whose mouths work right) your schedule isn’t set up to accommodate speech therapy. This is a problem—but not one without a simple solution designed to just kill you with embarrassment.

Namely, three times a week the speech pathologist—Mr. Grover—will open the door to band class where you are playing the trumpet badly. He will stand there in his brown blazer with the elbow patches and beckon you to therapy.

The timing is random. You cannot make preparations.

This means the teacher must stop the entire band class from playing so you can get up, stow your trumpet, and traipse off to talk about Sally selling seashells by the seashore. Your classmates watch you the entire time. Death by immolation feels like a palatable alternative.

We all get mocked for things in middle school. Clothes. Awkwardness. Bad hair. The list is lengthy for all but the luckiest among us. But the only bullying that ever stuck with me was people making fun of the way I talked. It still burns.

There’s no comeback that hits back just right, because whatever rejoinder you might muster has to be delivered with same lisping, failing mouth that attracted ridicule to begin with. To this day I remember things said to me 26 years ago. I know who said them, where, and when.

I spent years—even after therapy ended—avoiding words with S’s in them. It became a verbal tic to prevent even a chance of shame. On the upside, it really expanded my vocabulary. You wouldn’t believe the words you learn to avoid saying just one letter.

This pointless sob story is really meant to say two things.

The first is something my best friend told me and it’s absolutely the truth: normalize speech problems.

People talk differently. Lisps. Stutters. De-rhotacism. Echolalia. We judge people harshly and wrongly for it.

The second is that I was lucky to get speech therapy at all. Tens of thousands of kids never get that intervention. It’s life changing.

I never met anyone at Harvard with a speech impediment. With an n of 1,000 people, that tells you something about speech and opportunity.

Lastly, speech pathologists do the Lord’s work every day. If you know one, thank them.

Few people do more to improve the daily lives of others in perpetuity. The life I live today is thanks in large part to Mr. Grover’s dogged determination to fix a kid who got there too late.

Epilogue: There was a kid who had to do speech with me. His face was malformed and they broke his jaw to fix him. He learned to talk correctly alongside me. We suffered together.

Today, if you’re at Fort Sill, your battalion surgeon may well be that other 7th grade speech hero.