New Year Resolutions

Here is a list of my New Year resolutions. I know that many people make them in the beginning of a New Year and I never made one before. That’s why I thought that I should try to do one this year. Maybe it will help me to improve my life in many ways and get me much closer to my goals and dreams. At the same time it will keep me accountable on my commitments since I’ll be giving all of you updates on my progress.

1. Get closer to God: All of my life I knew little about God and was not very close to Him. This year I plan to change that by finally reading the entire Bible. I’m already in the middle of Genesis and will finish it
soon.

2. Speech Therapy: For some time now I’ve forgotten about the importance of speech therapy and didn’t work on my speech very seriously. I realize that I need to change that. That’s why my goal is to work on my speech almost everyday for at least 2 hours.

3. Get a job: Right now I’m in a place where I must get a job and be financially successful. There are already some important developments on this front that I plan to share with all of you soon.

4. Make this blog a lot more popular: One way to make this blog more popular is to build steady traffic. I already have some ideas on how to do that and will reveal them soon.

What are your New Year resolutions for this year?

Fall semester was great

Yup. It went pretty well even though it was one of the most challenging semesters I had in Brooklyn College. That's because in this semester I took advanced accounting classes that focused on difficult to understand topics. In addition to this, my goal was to get excellent grades in all of my classes and not just to pass them. All of this meant that I had to work very hard this semester. As a result of this hard work and a lot of studying, I had a lot less time for other things like this blog. That's part of the reason why I didn't post often the last few months. Now that the semester is finally over, I'm very happy to say that my hard work paid off big time because I managed to get good grades that I can be proud of. This is just one more of countless examples that proves that strong determination and hard work always pays off.

I had a test today in one of my Accounting classes

That’s right. It’s that time of the year again for those of us who still go to school. Over all I’m very happy how it went. It’s mainly because for the past week or so I studied really hard in hopes of getting a good grade like an A or a B. I usually don’t do this since I don’t like studying but with the support and encouragement from my family I did it and I believe it brought good results. I’ll find out for sure at the end of this week or early next week.

Not only I had a test today but my college also had a fire drill. Some people might like them and some people might hate them since they take away time from classes. But today at least for my class it was very different because this particular fire drill couldn’t have happened at a more inconvenient moment. Like in the middle of our test. You read it right! I’m sure everyone hates it when it happens to them. Luckily it didn’t have any impact on me since I get extra time on exams. I just took that time to relax and to focus on getting a good grade on my test. I hope it didn’t have any negative impact on my classmate’s performance on the same test though…

Did anything similar happen to you?

Speaking to new people is still hard for me…

Like for most people who stutter, it was always almost impossible for me to speak with new people. In fact it was so difficult when I was a lot younger that whenever I would talk to a new person my mind would literally go blank and freeze. Because of this the only way I would talk to a new person is if I absolutely had to and couldn’t really avoid it. That’s why for majority of my life I have done everything in my power to avoid talking to new people for as long as possible.

I did it and continue to do that to a large degree for many reasons. One major reason why I presently tend to avoid contact with new people is because I feel completely out of control in speaking situations most of the time. Because of this, I feel that in some way a wall exists between me and the whole world that needs to be broken down if I ever going to be free from my stuttering. Now that I’m older I’m beginning to try to change my life for the better by breaking this imaginary wall that only exists in my mind.

The most recent example of me trying to change my behavior is when I went to the financial aid office at my college. Of course I was feeling very nervous, anxious and not being in control as usual. But this time I actually tried to modify my thought pattern inside my head by telling myself that that an average person doesn’t really care that I stutter because I know that surveys consistently show that most people don’t care whether a person stutters or not. At the end this new self talk seemed to help and afterwards even though speaking to a new person was still hard I felt very good about myself. I guess it’s because I was able to do it and didn’t avoid it like I usually do. It also helped that a person I talked to was friendly. This small progress gave me hope that with enough time it would get a lot easier speaking with new people and making new friends.

To my fellow Jewish readers: Happy Yom Kippur! :)

All of us know that the Day of Atonement is the holiest day of the year for all of us. It is a day of atonement, repentance and forgiveness. I hope all of you will spend it asking for forgiveness from those people who you wronged, asking for forgiveness from G-d and attend a synagogue. That is what I'll be doing. May all of you be written in the book of life!

For people who are curious to learn more about Yom Kippur, you can go here. ;)

I received $1,337 in financial aid assistance for the current fall semester!

Right now I’m taking a few extra classes at Brooklyn College, one of the best public colleges in NYC. Like most college students, I have applied for financial aid by filling out a FAFSA. Yesterday I finally went to the financial aid office to find out if any financial aid was awarded to me. It turned out that I still received it even though I filled out a FAFSA not too long ago. This news made me very excited and my family happy because we were a little worried that I might not get financial aid this year. :)

Time is the most precious commodity we all have...

Because it's limited and once it's gone we can never get it back. I sometimes remind myself of this when I have free time. One occasion I thought about it is when I and my family went to Brighton Beach on Labor Day. I had a great time that day and all of us had a lot of fun. When walking on the beach, I thought about how I already lost a lot of valuable time in my life because I still continue to let my stuttering to control my life by stopping me from fully enjoying it and trying to make my dreams and ambitions a reality. Practically all my life I submitted to my stuttering and made a lot of sacrifices like missing on a lot of things that normal people experience. Basically I'm letting life to completely pass me by and not really participating in it like all of you. In other words I'm just like an observer that just observes what other people do with their lives and not doing anything with mine. I admit this kind of life is boring, not exciting and most of all meaningless. I live with this reality as I continue to lose more precious time as I get older by distracting myself with things I enjoy to do like the Internet. Clearly this is not normal and has to stop because I don't really want this kind of worthless life for me, especially when I know that I can completely change my life if I really wanted to and worked very hard.

I know that for me there's a way out if I'll have very strong hope, desire, determination and work very hard every day. That's why at present time I'm trying to change my life and get free from my stuttering once and for all. That means not letting my stuttering to hold me back from living and really enjoying life. At the same time I know that even if I'll be successful at getting free and winning my life back, I already lost a lot of very valuable time that I can never get back no matter what I do in addition on missing out on a lot of things life offers. This is a very important lesson to learn for all of us. I really hope that all of you will learn it too after reading about my experience, won't repeat my mistake and will use time you have left wisely and not just waste it away.

I’m back! Hopefully for a while this time… :)

I sincerely apologize for not posting for a very long time. I was busy with life and at the same time was feeling more hopeless than usual. This resulted in me being a lot less motivated to do anything like continuing posting on this blog.

I hope in the coming months my situation will change for the better and new confidence that I will succeed at the end no matter what and a renewed desire to work very hard will return to me once again. This will of course bring many new interesting posts for all of you to enjoy. I’ll also have a lot of fun writing them and once again share my life and talk about things that interest me. Who knows? Maybe all of us will learn something from all of it at the end.

I'm at very important crossroads right now

While celebrating a new year and my birthday recently, I couldn’t help but notice that right now I’m at very important crossroads at this point in my life. Some reasons for this are that we’re already in 2009 and I just turned 28 several days ago. Many people if not most at this point of their lives would have accomplished a lot more than I did so far in my own life. For example, many people are married and have children at this age. Other people have successful businesses or jobs that pay well. In addition to these accomplishments, most people at my age have an active social life that they enjoy and many friends that they have fun with. I so far don’t have any of these accomplishments unfortunately.

In the past for a very long time I blamed my severe stuttering for my current situation. I very firmly believed that if I could just completely control my stuttering in all situations once again like I could many years ago then everything would magically change in my life. That means that in my mind everything depended on the breakage of my stuttering and without this my life couldn’t be made better. That’s why I waited for many years for my stuttering to break before finally starting to move on with my life and start to finally living it. The major problem with this plan was that I gave up and was willing to sacrifice far too much in order to wait until my stuttering was under my complete control again. In other words I put my entire life on hold and let my stuttering to hold me back instead of living it or at least attempting to live it. My situation was made worse because for some reason my stuttering remained outside my control to this very day.

For many years until very recently I failed to realize that my plan to wait until my stuttering was under my control again was very wrong and didn’t work. I finally began to see how wrong my plan was when my sister challenged me in one of our many conversations to think about everything and to analyze everything in my life. I saw that my severe stuttering could only stop me from living my life like everyone else if I only let it. I saw that if I really tried very hard, I probably would have at least some success at living my life. That’s because over the years I’ve been having limited progress in getting my stuttering under control. That’s why my stuttering was getting slowly better in some ways over the years. One sign of this is that most people seem to understand me at the end when I talk with them in person. In the past this certainly wasn’t like this at all. I also finally realize that I have waited for far too long and don’t really have an option of continuing to wait and do almost nothing to free myself from my stuttering anymore. After a lot of deep thinking I for the first time see that my current situation is not entirely due to my severe stuttering. My attitude and passiveness toward everything also played a major part. I finally see that if I will let this continue, then I will not accomplish anything in life and life will just continue to pass me by. In other words I’m in a very important struggle right now for my life. If I will fail then it will simply mean that my entire life would pass me by and be totally wasted. That means that I’m right now somewhere between life and death. That’s how serious my current situation is. In order to prevent the worst case scenario, succeed and revolutionize my life I finally realize that I not only have to work at getting my stuttering under control. I also must make major improvement in all areas of my life. That’s the only way I’ll be entirely free at the end. I’ll keep you informed on my progress and the steps I’m planning to take or already taking in order to completely change my life for the better.

By the way I hope that all of you had a very good holiday season despite of the terrible economy we are in right now!