Simple Truths of Life - страница 27

I must say that while stuttering was over, my habit of dreaming and thinking about something did not go away completely. Because of this, from time to time I had stupor in my speech or even returned to the old methods of being silent and inactive, as in my previous episode at VDNKh. At that time, I no longer had friends with whom I could learn to speak. Therefore, having a lot of free time, I decided to travel to Moscow shopping centers to talk with different merchants on different topics – depending on what they were selling.

At first, my old fears reminded me of themselves, and I did not immediately dare to open my mouth. But with each new seller that I approached, I became more self-confident and soon became an ordinary person with normal speech. At the same time, I learned about the fact that some sellers will get out of their way trying to sell goods. It is good that I did not take with me money then and I did not have a credit card, because who knows, maybe I would have bought that camera with a huge touch screen…

I also realized during my aspirations to be focused on reality that it is impossible to be stuttering if you are here and now, since your body is under your complete control.

From time to time, I often recalled my decision to begin to fantasize purposefully at the age of 14, and I was depressed by the thought that I had lost as many as 4 years in my imagination. But then I told myself that with an average life of 60 years, I still have about 42 years to enjoy life – in fact, I lived less than one third of my life, just having entered adulthood, and the whole life was still was ahead of me. My experience has given me a chance to learn something unique about human mind.

I also had no desire to play video games anymore. And I regretted spending a lot of time on UFO related websites too for a while… but then my feelings cooled down and I remembered that I had a good reason for doing that – my experience with the bright entity in the village prompted me to start looking for answers to my questions about the unknown side of life and its meaning.

It is a pity that these joyful attempts at self-inspiration were met with a bitter understanding that I would also have to live all these long years with an asymmetry on my lip and with hair falling out.

Then the summer came, and I went to the village. I naively believed that I could regain my old relations with my village friends, but upon arrival it became clear that time was gone. Over the past years, that I was lost in my imagination, I moved away from my friends too much and could not reduce the gap that had formed.

One day it rained, and I was sitting by the window in the Little House, learning English. It suddenly dawned on me that now that stuttering was no longer a barrier in my life, I could achieve many things that I could only dream of before. Then I started to have a burning desire to leave Russian and live in the USA, since from early childhood I was partial to that country, which so often shined on me from the TV screen. I always liked their way of life and values, and I thought back then that the United States was almost a paradise on Earth.

I quickly left for Moscow and started searching on the Internet about the possibilities of emigration. It quickly became clear that it is not that simple, especially for a person without a higher education. But I did not allow this bad news to stop me – I no longer wanted to hide from problems and give up halfway.