When I was a child, I was a lonely child, and I relied on adverbs and disclaimers to make my presence felt. When I became an adult, I told children that it was okay to be afraid and that there were books they should not read. I told them that they could not know what was best and that it was best not to know.

When I became an adult, I read newspapers whose articles I did not understand, and I acquired a form of language so basic that it hurt to put what I was thinking into words that I could say.

When I was a child, I believed that there was a strength to literacy, and I held it like a shield, but once I began to strip the words away, everything began to hurt less. To be free from the words that pressed themselves into sentences, like the way my mother squeezed her children's feet into year-old shoes, made me feel better. I started talking again, and I was thankful that my small vocabulary left me with less to say. It was easier to be truthful, and it was easier to lie.