Matice Morris adjusts the camera sitting on a tripod under a glowing ring light. She moves the throw pillow behind her, pulls up her notes on her phone and takes a sip of water. She peers closer at her image on the small flip screen and wipes a smudge of lipstick from her teeth.

She pushes record -- beep.

It’s time to slay the dragons.

“Hi, you guys,” she says. Then, she’s stuck. Her chin trembles, eyes squint, her lips are pursed and the words refuse to budge.

“I’m going to start over,” she says. “I know I haven’t recorded in a while,” she starts. She hits a roadblock on the next word.

Morris, now 30, started speech therapy because of her stuttering in first grade. For 10 years, she worked with professionals to help her words flow more fluently. After middle school, she moved from Rockford, Illinois to a new high school in St. Louis. She spent the entire first semester eating lunch in a restroom stall. She didn’t want to start with the halting introduction again. Blank stares. Uncomfortable pauses.

Sometimes, she stutters on her own name.

By her junior year, she had made friends and had enough with speech therapy. She tended to stay quiet in groups and communicated mainly through texting and social media messages. Her words flow so much faster when she can type them, but still not as fast as her mind is thinking them.

Now, in front of the camera, she’s starting to sweat. She picks up a poster and fans herself.

“I’ve noticed a trend in comments of all you saying my stuttering has improved,” she says to nearly 30,000 subscribers on her YouTube channel.

But to someone with a lifelong stutter, that’s actually not a compliment, she explains.

“It kind of makes them feel like a failure when they have not improved,” Morris says. She’s posted more than 50 videos since she launched the channel 2 1/2 years ago.

She wanted to encourage other people with speech impediments and to share what it’s like to struggle to speak. She wanted to reclaim her voice.

It took her three years after graduating with a master’s in accounting to get a job because potential employers had trouble seeing past her speech challenges. One recruiter told her it would be difficult to help her because employers would assume she was mentally challenged based on her speech.

The obstacles made her more determined. She has always dreaded public speaking.

“My goal is to conquer my fears,” she said. “Even when I am nervous or stressed or scared about my stutter, I still make the video.”

Not only has she built a significant following online, she has self-published a book, “The Product of My Selfishness: The Stutter and the Story.” In sharing her struggles, she has inspired others who ask her for advice on how to navigate school and relationships. Among them, she deals with a few ignorant and hurtful remarks.

Morris pulls up the screenshots she took of a commenter who wrote that she would rather just learn sign language. When Morris responded, the poster replied: “thank God you wrote that because it probably would’ve took u forever to say it!” In her next response, the person curses at Morris and writes, “continue giving us, the ppl, a good laugh!”

At this point, Morris’ mother steps into the comments and tells her daughter to stay focused and remember the words of former first lady Michelle Obama: “When they go low, we go high.”

The video Morris is trying to make tonight is not going well -- probably because I’m watching her record it and making a stressful situation even more so.

“I might have to re-record this later,” she said, after switching the camera off.

She pulls up the last public message she received from the critic who taunted her.

“I want to apologize to you for my previous comments,” the commenter wrote. “It was never my intention to come at you in such a manner and it might have been delivered wrong.”

Morris smiled.

“She’s literally the only person who has ever apologized.”

Her biggest fear is speaking on a stage in front of a crowd. It’s far more intimidating than talking into her camera.

So, she’s now looking for an opportunity to speak live.

Another dragon to slay.

I’m not going to hold President Donald Trump’s draft-dodging grandfather who got deported from present-day Germany against him.

Similarly, it’s not fair to claim Trump is a racist by citing his father’s arrest at a KKK riot in New York in 1927. You can judge Trump’s racism based on his very own words and actions.

In the same vein, I’m not interested in punishing Robert Sagastume, a graduate student at Washington University, for his mother’s decision to reunite her family. Sagastume will graduate with two master’s degrees from the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University next month. His mother brought him to America from Honduras in 2001, when he was 12, to reunite with her other children in Kansas City, whom they had not seen in six to seven years.

Sagastume and his mom entered legally on tourist visas. His mother got her green card and filed on his behalf. Then attacks on 9/11 changed immigration policies, and Sagastume’s application fell through the cracks.

He had no idea.

He was a top student in high school, a member of the National Honor Society, and won a full-ride scholarship to college. That’s when he learned the truth about his status.

“I cried so much,” he said. “I felt all my dreams of going to college had been torn apart.”

His family told him to take landscaping jobs and hide in the shadows.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program gave him a chance to regain his life. After a thorough application process, he got DACA protection in 2012, becoming a so-called “Dreamer.” After 15 years of living undocumented, it allowed him to get a driver’s license, a credit card, bank account, apartment and internship. He married a U.S. citizen in 2015 and has a green card now.

His dream is to help others and continue contributing to his country.

Eduardo, who also lives in the St. Louis area, knows this journey. (We are identifying him only by his middle name, since DACA’s status is in limbo.) His parents brought him from Mexico legally when he was 6 years old. They overstayed a visa, and Eduardo became undocumented. He worked hard and lived cautiously. His family paid his way through college, where he graduated cum laude with an engineering degree.

But without legal status, he could not apply for jobs. For three years, he worked as a cook in his parents’ restaurant.

DACA changed his life: He was finally able to get a job in his field. He has reapplied for DACA every two years, as required by law.

The night he heard that Trump rescinded the program, his heart broke.

“I remember crying myself to sleep that night,” he said. “I live in perpetual fear of what’s happening.”

The Supreme Court will ultimately decide whether Trump’s decision to shut down the federal program protecting nearly 800,000 Dreamers was appropriate. But there’s a more fundamental moral question at stake for the rest of us: Is it fair to destroy the lives of so many people, who had no choice when their parents brought or kept them here as children?

If you would object to the government throwing you in prison for a crime your mother or father committed, it’s intellectually dishonest to want to deport Dreamers.

We shouldn’t hold the president accountable for the questionable immigration past of his grandfather or the Department of Justice investigations into his father’s unwillingness to rent to black tenants.

Let’s set aside that the president’s close adviser, Stephen Miller, was busy sending Brietbart hundreds of emails promoting white supremacist propaganda before he began crafting the administration’s immigration policies. It’s probably just a coincidence that he’s the same guy who wanted to tear babies from their (nonwhite) parents at the southern border.

The story of what makes us American is intensely personal. The Trump family history reveals how complicated and contested these narratives can be.

Of course, it’s bad public policy for the president to hold 800,000 people hostage over his own mommy and daddy issues.

It’s certainly not his fault that his current wife, Melania, was granted an “Einstein” visa -- typically awarded to Nobel winners and prominent scientists -- after her nude cover shoot as a model.

Good for her for using whatever technicalities identified her as a genius and got her on the path to citizenship. And if “chain migration” helped her bring her immigrant parents to America, too, well, good for them.

Eduardo and Robert’s mothers know what it’s like to want to keep your family together.

Since the Missouri Department of Health is so interested, let’s talk about our periods.

Put aside your spreadsheet and pull up a chair, Dr. Randy Williams. As the Kansas City Star first reported, investigators for the state health department you lead filtered through the private data of women who came to the one remaining abortion provider in Missouri. These investigators analyzed patients’ self-reported menstrual cycle dates, along with abortion procedure dates, on a hunt to find medical complications, which are rare.

It looks like the state was trying to build a political case to shut down the lone Planned Parenthood clinic -- but that’s probably just our lady hormones acting up.

However, once the rest of the country learned about how patients’ medical data was being used by your investigators, even plenty of non-menstruating people were horrified. Did these women consent to turning their menstrual cycle information over to the state to be used for political purposes? It seems counter-intuitive that women seeking an abortion would want their private medical information used in an attempt to shut down the only place in the state that they can get one.

But Randy knows best, right?

Of course, the department denies that you ever asked for or even had possession of this information, which was emailed around with an “erroneous” subject line of “Director’s Request.” And we’re sure it has nothing to do with the state’s Republican lawmakers’ personal crusade to deny women the right to make their own health care decisions. You have to admit that our legislature pays special attention to men’s opinions and beliefs about whether women they’ve never met should be forced to carry a fetus and give birth after they’ve been raped. We can see how that might lead you to think your speculum can slide into any lady’s private data, Randy, but hold up one bloody minute.

If the state is so deeply concerned about our reproductive health, why did your department try earlier this year to force doctors to perform an additional, medically unnecessary vaginal exam three days before an abortion? Doctors already perform a pelvic exam just before a procedure. This seemed like another weirdly invasive call by your department. Unsurprisingly, it led to another national outcry.

Eventually, you backed down from that new requirement, but we can’t help but notice a strange pattern here: You’re awfully interested in what’s happening with our vaginas. So, we’re going to save you and your department from creating another Aunt Flo registry.

Here’s what women can tell you about tracking our periods: Our cycles can be irregular. We don’t always exactly recall the first day of our last cycle. We trust our doctors far more than government bureaucrats to advise us on our medical options and risks. We see through politicians’ lip service about being “pro-life” when they won’t act to lower the state’s sky-high rate of gun deaths or the high maternal mortality rate.

Hypocrisy leaves the nastiest stain.

Perhaps state officials miscalculated how some women are going to respond to these extreme measures to control, track and regulate our bodies.

Women in suburban areas in Missouri may not be so keen on having a governmental cycle tracker. Earlier this week, voters in a traditionally Republican St. Louis suburb flipped the 99th District state House seat in a massive swing. In 2018, the Republican candidate won this seat by 6 percentage points.

Democrat Trish Gunby beat her opponent on Tuesday by 8 percentage points.

Track those numbers, Randy.