Elevating the Human Experience

Preface

Ever since I was a little girl, I struggled to feel worthy of love. I didn’t know what to call it as a child, but as I lay in bed at night in the room I shared with my older brother, the evidence seemed to mount in that direction. Something always seemed to be a bit off, crooked, like the pinky finger on my right hand that does not straighten. Children would be equal parts fascinated and repulsed by my crooked finger. I would proudly tell them that it was “genetic,” using a big word to tell them that I was born that way. And, no, as weird as it looked, it did not hurt. Sometimes they wouldn’t believe me, and they would try to force my finger to straighten, pushing it down as hard as they could under a pile of books. That did hurt. And my crooked finger reminded me, and them, that I was not quite worthy.

It was my mother who noticed that I could not see or hear what other children could. She tells the story of watching me sit dressing my Barbies on the rug while she called my name from across the room. As she tells it, I never looked up, never heard her. I have no memory of this. I had surgery on my ears at age four, and by then I had a 70% hearing loss. My eyes, we discovered later, were closer to blind than they were to 20/20 vision.

As the world around me grew quieter and more out of focus, I have a clear memory—a memory that I trust in that unreliable and murky place of what we piece together of our past from photograph and story—of running through Heathrow Airport ...