You know that excited feeling you have when you're little, as you wait on the front doorstep for the mail carrier to bring you a package? Every afternoon right when you get home from school, you run out and sit on that step for hours until the mail carrier tells you, 'Sorry, nothing today.' At first, you are hopeful and tell yourself that tomorrow will be the day. Then days turn into weeks and weeks turn into months; you begin to give up hope. It's been almost twelve years now, and I'm still sitting on my front doorstep waiting for my package to arrive. It's been so long that, for a while, I even forgot what was in that package. But today I know exactly what I have been sitting around waiting for: I have been waiting to live. Life is what that package contains, and once I have it securely in my hands, I know I won't ever let it go again.     

I wasn't a cookie-cutter child; I didn't fit into the same mold as my eight-year-old friends. At least that's what having dyslexia and Tourette syndrome felt like to me. In second grade, my stomach twisted in knots every time the teacher asked the class to take out our readers. I came to detest those books about Jill and Jack with their dog, Spot. Who names their dog Spot anyway? The words printed on the pages of my reader were like puzzles my mind tried to solve but never could. As the teacher went around the room, calling on different people to read a passage aloud, I'd pretend to be invisible while praying that she'd skip over me. Eventually, the teacher would call out my name. The routine was always the same: I'd sit there for a few minutes making thhh or mmm sounds as I tried to sound out words like those or much. The teacher would stand in