Chapter 4: At Your Best, You Are Love

By the age of three, I had learned to read fluently and was beginning to comprehend most of what I read. I would pursue the attention of family and friends in hopes that they would serve as a potential audience to my reading prowess often holding them hostage in order to read my favorite books to them. Unbeknownst to me, reading would be a skill that served as an escape from the reality of a world that required that I cope with some very unsettling matters. Reading books became my way of coping with the hills and valleys that surfaced while growing up in a household overshadowed by domestic violence. As matters became increasingly worse overtime, Arthur and Corduroy, characters from one of my favorite childhood books, would serve to distract me from the reality of turmoil and turbulence.