About six years ago, my world turned upside down as my sight receded into blurs and whorls of color and light. One thing that changed most was how I read.

As someone who loved books, I didn’t want to completely abandon the written word. Against the advice of a low-vision specialist, who told me Braille was too hard to learn, I threw myself into the world of tactile words with equal parts trepidation and determination.

The specialist was right. It was hard. Though it took me only two weeks to memorize the code, the dots under my fingers felt disconnected…

When you read a good story, a lot happens. It activates your visual cortex as if you were actually seeing what the words describe. Your oxytocin levels spike, bringing on all sorts of warm and fuzzy feelings. The nifty neurochemical is called the “love hormone” for a good reason. Whenever you do something that fosters feelings of empathy or bonding with someone elseelse — such as hugging them, giving birth to a child, or having an orgasm by their hand — your oxytocin levels rise. You feel all warm inside and like all’s right in the world. …

I didn’t hear a damn thing until I was six.

When my parents discovered my deafness at four months, the audiologist told them that I was the deafest baby she had ever met. I didn’t react to even the loudest sounds, which were noted as no-reaction on my audiogram. The most powerful hearing aids did nothing, so I ended up feeding them to the dog (to my mother’s horror). My cochlea was the equivalent of an auditory black hole: sound just disappeared without as much as a blip registering in my mind. Contrary to popular belief, this sort of congential…

If you had met me six years ago, you would’ve found me to be an ordinary young woman where my vanities were concerned.

Whenever I passed by the mirror, my gaze assessed my reflection. I zeroed in on my physical flaws. The bump on my nose. My belly’s stubborn convexity that refused to disappear despite all of my crunches. My short legs. The list of my physical imperfections went on and on. When I felt charitable, I noted my more pleasing features: eyes with eyelashes that didn’t need mascara and hair that behaved reasonably well. Once my evaluation was over…

When I was 11, my 13-year-old sister locked herself into her room in a fit of teenage angst. Before she quarantined herself, she covered my parents’s bathroom mirror with post-its detailing their every transgression. As you might’ve guessed, there were many. One crime was that our parents paid more attention to me.

It was a complaint that all older siblings seem to have. This time, there was some truth to it. My parents, especially my mother, had spent a lot of time with me growing up. They took me to Sign classes so I could learn to communicate in a…

Every time a famed artist is felled by some shocking revelation, we start wringing our hands. “What should we do?” we cry. “Should we keep on enjoying their art? Or should we boycott beautiful things create by filthy people?” The latest furor over Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long record of seriously nasty sexual harassment was no different.

A letter to the editor of The New York Times expresses just this sort of hand-wringing:

While most people agree that Harvey Weinstein behaved disgracefully, there is an overarching question that his conduct raises. …

When a book comes along at just the right time, it changes you forever. A Wrinkle in Time was that book for me.

A Wrinkle in Time begins with the disappearance of Dr. Murry, a scientist working on a top-secret government project. He leaves behind a wife and four children. Everyone in town gossips that Dr. Murry has run off with another woman, a woman more like other women. Mrs. Murry, after all, is a scientist in her own right, an oddity in those times. When Meg and her precocious five-year-old brother Charles Wallace cross paths with a popular high…

When I was nine, my class went on a field trip to a sensory research lab. A local TV crew came along as part of a human interest story on what schoolchildren thought about animal testing. It must’ve been a really slow news week. All of my classmates mugged for the camera as the crew filmed us, thrilled at the prospect of fame, as modest as it might’ve been. When the reporter asked for volunteers for on-camera interviews, everyone’s hands went up, including mine. The smartly dressed reporter smiled and pointed at me. She picked me! I was chosen! were…