Jessica Haynes | Letting Nothing Stand in My Way of Achieving My Goal

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My Journey to #AchieveMore

Growing up adults always tell you to "study hard" and "get good grades" so you can go to a good college and become a doctor or a lawyer. It was always implied that you needed those things to be successful in life. I believe they were wrong. It was always implied that money means everything. I am 28 years old now and I am just now realizing everything I was told as a child was wrong. I do not believe that money is everything now but success is. As a child I had a disability and it was declared that I was a poor auditory processor with a speech impediment. Up until elementary school ended, I was in a special education program with a class of only 5-6 other students. I never really understood why I was in those classes because I was not impaired to a sense I could not learn. The only difference between me and other students was that I had a different way of learning and my speech was not the greatest. Eventually I learned to avoid certain words in my vocabulary and adjusted to this. As I got older, I made friends with people who's names I had trouble saying and it was hard. People assumed I was not intelligent because when I got excited about topics I started to talk faster and forget to avoid the words I can't say. I would be laughed at and knew I was being judged from the start. In middle school, we had an assignment that we wrote a poem to read to the class out loud. I had just moved to the new school and begged my parents not to bring up anything about my disability because I didn't want to be "different" from anybody else. I wrote the best poem I've created and once I got up there to read my poem, I was so excited and nervous that I literally forgot how to say the one word that was in poem and had a minor panic attack. The teacher asked me to step out to get a drink of water and I came back to the class, but before entering I heard the teacher talking to the students about me. About how "it didn't even sound like I wrote it". It was the one time in my life I had ever been ashamed of myself and I just ended up breaking down in the hallway alone crying. One day I made a visit to Baylor University and everything changed. It became my goal to become a student there. I now am studying Biology and never even thought I would get past the basics with an associate's degree. That visit changed my life. My goal to achievement was to prove to people that you can have a disability and you can still be successful in life. Prove everyone wrong. Not just for me, but for my husband and my wonderful fur-children as well.

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