We Are The Stories We Tell

"I staved off boredom as a child by telling my grandma stories as my mother listened from the dining room, where she counted coins from my father's vending machines. We'd sit on the tiny blue sofa in the living room, which she used as a bed, and my grandma would listen intently, smiling and nodding, as my dreamy stories took us far away from our unhappy house in Rochester's inner city.

I can still see them in their peasant dresses surrounded by the drabness of the furniture and peeling wallpaper, and myself in their eyes, where to them I was more than what my performance in school described, more than what my teachers believed I was capable of, more than what I knew and didn't know about the real world. They knew who I was from my stories. And from the love they felt for me. There are times, while giving a reading, when I will catch myself looking for their faces in the audience. I'm looking for the comfort and encouragement memory provides, and the nostalgia of reclamation. We are the stories we tell, the things we make up and invent, we are more than the answers we give to questions, more even than our limitations - we are the cantankerous, infinitely mysterious dreams we somehow find the courage to imagine and sometimes to tell others."

- My Dyslexia By Phylip Schultz (pages 113-114)