May 11th 2018
Taking a little time to share the story of a person in my life who has inspired me.
I started a blog as a way to write about my personal experience, lessons I’ve learned, things that inspire me, and about the inner workings of life as a whole. However, I haven’t taken very much time to write in depth about people in my life. It is not that I don’t care enough to write about my loved ones, it is just that there has been no incident that has inspired me enough to write a full post about one person.
However, today is a special occasion and I decided to take the time out to write a small post about someone in my life who inspires me every day, my little brother. Well, to start out, my brother isn’t so “little” anymore. Despite being 2 years younger than me, he is also about 6 inches taller than me so I feel like I’ve started looking like the younger sibling. Today my little brother graduates college and moves onto a year of graduate school. Although he is not walking at his ceremony until next year, this is still a really important time and I am incredibly proud of him.
My brother, Matthew, hasn’t always been the brightest student. To put it lightly, he struggled….a lot. Matthew has Auditory Processing Disorder (APD). APD only impacts about 5% of school aged children and it is characterized by the inability to process auditory information in the same way as other students because what he hears and what he processes aren’t fully coordinated. To give you an example that I’ve heard my mom use before, “If a teacher asked Matt to take out his math textbook, turn to page 40, and do questions 1-10 odds only, Matt would get his text book out and that’s it.”
However, Matt has come an incredibly long way since his days as a struggling elementary and middle school student. As a child, my mom put Matt into karate classes as a way to help him learn to follow directions and learn sequencing. It helped a lot and you could see my brother’s ability to pick up on auditory information improve greatly. However, high school was his real turning point where Matt discovered the ways he best learned and retained information.
Since then, Matt has had a 4.0 for most of college, has been inducted to many honor societies, and is working 2 jobs where he does some really great work. I am incredibly proud of my brother because he has shown me that no challenge is too big and where you start doesn’t have to determine where you will go.
I can’t wait to see where he goes from here.
Jess~
JessofEarth 
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