Beyond the complications and mid-year crisis’ of everyday high school life, I found peace through the impact of an educator.

Growing up, I struggled with a lateral lisp, a problem that took over the majority of my life. I could barely pronounce words that contained an “s”, “c”, or “z” in them, and felt more and more embarrassed daily as I tried to avoid speech and the English language as a whole. I found myself avoiding school, trying my hardest not to speak during class, and above all--avoiding conversations with peers I went to school with. The first 14 years of my life were filled with embarrassment and fear of speaking.

When I got to high school, I signed up to be a part of Debate 1, a class that would later be my anchor throughout life. I joined this class as the first step to improve my public speaking, and eventually grow out of my lisp.

On my first day of freshmen year, I walked into the debate room, and instantly fell in love with the environment.The coach of the team, Elizabeth Eskin, approached me with the warmest Jersey accent you’ve ever heard. She opened me up, for the first time, to the beauty behind public speaking.

Life, to me, will always mirror a painting. Every year, new colors are added. We cannot “erase” a color from our painting. Once our memories are added, they are located somewhere within the canvas. But with these memories, life lessons, and even despondent times, it is our choice as the painter to decide how we use them to create a beautiful picture. Every year represented a different life lesson taught to me through my beautiful coach, and yet a different color, with its own individualized meaning, added to the painting of my life.

Freshmen year, as it will for everyone, became a strenuous time to deal with. I had to change my performance material multiple times through the school year, resulting in a full catastrophe. After an era of countless failures, sleepless nights, and fear of performing in front of new people, I felt the need to approach my coach and have a discussion with her about my year. There were tears. Lots of them. But in the midst of the early morning breakdown, Ms. Eskin enlightened me with a quote that still impacts me to this day. She said, despite my temporary feelings of moroseness, “Every artist was first an amateur” (Ernest Hemingway). I took this quote home with me, slept on it, and woke up feeling ready to write a less cringeworthy speech. Alongside the critiques of judges, the help of my own team, and the words directly from my coach, I gave better performances. With this, I was given strength through failure in the form of the color blue. Stereotypically, blue represents sadness. But in this sense, it's used as a form of undeniable strength in light of any form of failure.

Throughout my sophomore year, I struggled with the ability to define my self worth. After finding the confidence to speak and not be ashamed of my lisp anymore, I started to mentally develop an addiction to competing, merely for the trophies and recognition. Though this may seem like a positive thing, it poses a great harm to a Future Me, who will one day not have speech in her life to keep her going. Naturally, I went straight to Ms. Eskin to talk to her about my life problems. One impactful idea I learned through her is that my self worth is not represented by tangible items acquired through competing. Instead, it is a culmination of how I treat others who I am competing with, how I help my team, and how I find beauty in the literature I use to compete with. With this knowledge, I opened myself up to meeting new people in the circuit of competition, and found happiness through newly bound friendships. I started to volunteer more through workshopping and labs, and found happiness through my love for service. And finally, I grew to love all things literature. I fell in love with everything speech and debate offered. My coach gave me a clear definition of what I should define my self worth to be, and so I painted it green on my canvas. Green, in this context, represented a world of opportunity to be offered through speech.

When I became a junior, I felt a bit of repetition through what I was performing at tournaments. It was the same message, a similar novel, an extremely similar speech. I turned to my coach, who taught me to expand my train of thought past my comfort zone. In her words, she said “it’s better to be the competitor who took a risk than felt comfortable in his/her own safety zone.” So, naturally, I took this advice and acted on it. Instead of merely focusing on socio-cultural issues, I turned to learn more about rare eye-diseases (a subject I had never thought I could perform well with) and picked up an autobiography talking about it. Though this was completely out there and a challenging feat to venture out towards, I found myself turning to it because of the curiosity for what it could become. After months of drafting and competing, this piece helped me qualify to Nationals and thus, helped me realize that even the most ridiculous ideas can get you somewhere. In relation to life, Ms.Eskin taught me that learning to be comfortable in weird, different situations will help life become a lot less unpleasant. With the help of my coach, I was given the color red, to teach me that even the most outrageously different actions can be fiercely powerful.

In my final year, some of the most important experiences surfaced as the stepping stones to a brighter future.

After becoming captain, I had to look beyond myself to be a true leader in my team and in my community as a whole. After analyzing the work my coach did through service, I felt inspired to be able to make a distinct change in the function of the speech side of the team. I lectured, encouraged greater productivity at practice, and established strict deadlines to help teammates get their work done early, for further improvement. With the four years of experience, I used my time each and every day to help my teammates grow stronger. As my coach always said, “no great action, big or small, will ever go unnoticed,” so I fell in love with the idea of helping others before myself, and in time the team grew stronger. Through service, I found peace. This all lead up to the the most important day of my life when I was awarded the NSDA Student of the Year award on behalf of my district. Actually attaining an award was meaningless, however, the weight of the message behind it solidified an infinitely powerful moment. As pictured above, I literally could not stop hugging my coach. Every tear, tournament, hour of practice, day of service, and year of hard work lead up to feeling like I made a difference to the people of my team, school, and district. So I took this moment, I held onto it tight, and I let it glow on my canvas as bright yellow. For nothing, could outshine this moment.

After four years, I can proudly say I’m in love with public speaking. Debate has offered me an outlet to express myself, without the fear of being looked down upon. Daily practice, weekly competitions, and monthly trainings helped me learn to love my voice and its power to impact any given community. Above all, I no longer feel ashamed to have a lisp and let it impede my ability to speak.

So I thank you- for helping me find beauty in every color of life. I thank you for teaching me to find beauty in every form of literature, for helping me learn to love myself, and for helping me to fabricate performances that I will remember for a lifetime. Most of all, I thank you for leading the way to confidence through the power of my voice. With this, I thank you for helping me to be a proud artist, creating a proud work of art.