It was a bone-chilling cold day in December 2013, the icy wind was cut-throat, piercing every piece of open skin. Even though I had been inside for more than an hour I was still cold, how could I have been so cold? Nerves, the same ones that kept reminding me I was in the Silvia Auditorium, waiting to go on stage in front of hundreds of people. Time seemed to move as slow as molasses as I waited for the judges to call my name. When the they called my name I walked on stage, so I would not have to hear the eerie silence any more, I began my speech, ‘’I believe …..’’. This is the biggest obstacle I had to push through to overcome, but I did it just as Helen Keller did when she was not able to communicate.
Helen’s biggest obstacle she had to overcome was being blind and deaf. The lights and the sound was turned off when she was barely two years old. For about five years her the family did nothing to help her but show her pity and give her anything she wanted. They never tried to teach her, and she was becoming hard to control. Her parents were talking about either putting her in an asylum or bringing her a teacher. In the end they decide to get her a teacher, and brought in Annie Sullivan to do the job. Annie had to teach Helen obedience, trust and most of all, things have names. After just two weeks of being with Annie she had learned all those things. Helen pushed through that hard time in her life just as I did when trying to overcome my fear of public speaking.
Although to most people Helen’s obstacle would seem huge, but to me mine seemed scary, and ginormous. When my language teacher signed me up for a speech giving contest I thought, having lived in Olney, Illinois, it would be a small event. So I prepared my speech and sought out advice from my family and friends, they all said I would do fine and not to worry. So I did not worry, and when I arrived at the contest and saw all those people there I got really nervous and was in dire need of some help but the only people around was the other contestants. I had to push myself through, to walk onstage and recite my speech. In the end I did great and was strong like Helen Keller.
There are a lot of ways Helen Keller and I are alike, one way is at first we relied on other people to help fix our problems, when we should have tried to fix them ourselves. We also were both determined to get through it and overcome the problems with great success, making the most out of a difficult situation. Lastly we both used our struggles to make our lives better, Helen could now communicate, through her hands, to anyone and everyone. Once I overcame my fear it pushed me to do things that I normally would not, like running for a Greenhand office in FFA. Helen and I had different obstacles to overcome but we pushed through them in the same ways.
Helen Keller overcame the obstacle of not being able to communicate, as did I with the fear public speaking. By overcoming the fear of public speaking I am not afraid to talk in front of large crowds anymore. Helen taught me that you have push through even the hard times in life no matter how bad it gets. Helen Keller and I did not let our problems hold us back and and in the famous words of Helen Keller, ‘’The only thing worst than being blind is having sight but no vision’’.