Erin Sandell

My Journey

My Journey Through Language I was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, and was adopted and brought to America soon after. I do not know how I was cared for as an infant there or if anything happened to me there that would affect me later in life. But as a child, I was always shy. In elementary school, I was good at making friends with my peers but, I always had a problem talking to adults. Maybe it was because I had a slight lisp or even just because I'm an introvert, but it got so "bad" that my mother, a 3rd-grade teacher at the time, felt I should go to speech therapy. From my perspective, that didn't help. My journey through language has been rough. I’ve been pushed around a lot. Being taught to do one thing and then later on in life told it was wrong, to being silenced for months because it was the way of stripping my identity. My relationship with language has taken me down many different roads, but I feel like I’ve finally found my voice.