The first time books changed my life, I didn’t even know what a book was.
My mother reeled when I was diagnosed as totally Deaf at four months old. She called it “the destruction of dreams.”
“I wanted to be a mother, a good mother,” she once told me before…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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. …
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?” …
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…
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…
Literary merit can be a dangerous term. If you stand up in an English department meeting and declare that Hemingway is an alcoholic sexist who couldn’t write for the JCPenny catalogue, you may start a civil war. People get testy about this stuff.
As any teenager who has read the…
Stringing words together and hoping for the best. Find me at http://cristinahartmann.com
