"I remember a specific moment where after a concert, a person came up to me and they thanked me for having a speech handicap."
"I wanted to be liked, so I wanted to do whatever was necessary to be liked, to be accepted, to be popular."
"Don't pray that I come home real soon because if I come home real soon I'm gonna mess up again real big."
I stopped paying my bills. All my money went to alcohol, smoking, and things that are not healthy. What I was going to do at night became more important than going to school. I almost dropped out of school. I lost my job.
"God started showing me that it didn’t matter if I couldn’t talk plain. It didn’t matter if I couldn’t read and write good, that He was going to use that."
I didn’t know if God loved me. I was just so desperate. I started to try to find my identity in relationships with guys.
"I had never heard anyone pray like that. I knew right then that he had something that I did not have."
It would take me thirty minutes to work up the courage to say a word. I was just so inwardly petrified. I would have the bible at the corner of the East Village grill and I just couldn’t open my mouth. It was crazy.
"I was the girl on top of the bar with money being put on me, not remembering any of it the next morning."