The Story of My Life

Before I was two years old, an illness left me both deaf and blind, and for years afterward I lived in a silent, dark world with almost no way to reach the people around me.I grew wild and unruly, breaking things and striking out when I was frustrated, because I had no words for anything I wanted or felt.

When I was nearly seven, a young teacher named Anne Sullivan came to live with my family and try to reach me.She spelled words into my hand with her fingers, letter by letter, but for weeks I only copied the shapes like a game, with no idea that they meant anything at all.

One morning she held my hand under the spout of the water pump in our garden and spelled “w-a-t-e-r” into my other hand as the cool water rushed over my fingers.Suddenly I stood perfectly still, my whole attention fixed on the motion of her fingers.Somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me, and I understood that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something flowing over my hand.

That living word woke my soul, gave it light and hope and joy, and set it free.I left the pump eager to learn. Everything around me now had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought.As we walked back to the house, every object I touched seemed to quiver with a new life I could finally reach through language.

By the time I went to bed that night, I had learned thirty new words, and for the first time in my life I longed for a new day to come.That single afternoon at the pump was the turning point of my whole life; from it grew every idea and every hope I later had.I went on to learn to read, write, and even speak, and I graduated from college with honors — the first deaf-blind person ever to do so — and spent the rest of my life writing and speaking for people with disabilities around the world.