Kendall and I stood in exhausted silence, inching forward a half-step a time in the glacial line for Barracuda, her favorite taco joint. I’m wrung out from two days of talks at the New Orlean’s Bookfest. She’s wrung out for reasons only a 21-year-old on St. Patrick’s Day weekend knows.

As my gaze wanders, I ask, “Are we on Magazine Street?”

“No! We just went over this. What street are we on?”

Oh s**t.

I swivel my head to the left, scanning for the regulation blue street sign to cheat from. My eyes land on the capital ‘T’, followed by the 13 gobbledygook letters. Not even room for a trailing “street” or “road” to complete the thought.

I turn back to Kendall.

“Ta-chop-ill-us?” I ask, with all the confidence of the last kid picked for kickball.

Her blonde ponytail swooshes from side to side in disappointment.

“Geez mom! Listen, stop trying to sound it out by the letters, word nerd. You just have to memorize it until it becomes second nature.”

She’s right, I am a word nerd, book worm, analyze-it-until-I-understand-it straight-A student. I was a shy kid who moved at age eight, ten, twelve. A library book and my imagination spelled safety; the monkey bars and mean streets of suburbia didn’t. So in my room, in my happy solitude, I learned to decode the world through the careful examination of its constituent parts until I understood the whole.

It’s the strategy that got me through school, through my career, through life. See something. Break it into pieces. Reassemble.

But Kendall never had that option.

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We caught Kendall’s eye issues late.

She was in third grade, watching Connor read his doorstop copy of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, death-gripped on the couch. She stared at him with red-hot lasers of frustration.

“How can you read that when the words are jumping around on the page?”

Mike and I looked at each other.

“What do you mean, Bimi?” Mike asked.

“I don’t get how he can read so fast with all those words everywhere.”

Oh s**t.

We thought the glasses we’d begged and bribed her into wearing since she was two were all she needed. After the diagnosis, we learned the truth: yes blurry vision was an issue, but coordination an even bigger one. The muscles behind her eyes couldn’t figure out how to work together, so smoothly scanning a page probably felt like trying to hit a bullseye with a bow and arrow, while unicycling. Because of this, she couldn’t read when the words were less than 20-point font surrounded by enough white space to drive a truck through. Everything else was a blur.

There was real pain in that blur. Confusion at classmates breezing through fraction-covered worksheets twice as fast. Her peers plowing through Diary of a Wimpy Kid when she was plodding along, a finger holding the words in place.

So we got to work. Doctor visits and eye tests, physical therapy that gave her headaches, a series of frustrating confidence-sapping tutors. And a gradual realization about all the things she’d never be able to do well: take a standardized test with its tiny bubbles, read textbooks at anything but a glacial pace, spell by sounding things out. But worst of all by far was what all these experiences added up to for young Kendall: I’m stupid.

If you’ve been following this newsletter for any length of time, you are likely in the midst of a double-take. We’re talking about Kendall? The Queen of three-point turns, dead-pan delivery of truth bombs, and traveling solo through Europe?

The One and the Only.

I’m not sure how Kendall got from there to here. Even she can’t reverse-breadcrumb the exact path. All I can really tell you is that at one point she was a kid who thought something was broken in her, and then, sometime later, she was a kid on a mission, kicking ass and taking names. She had clearly come up with strategies and processes that worked for her, and wasn’t looking back.

I remember her saying, literally out loud on a couple occasions, “This is how my brain works.” No explaining, apologizing, or justifying required.

She deduced what she couldn’t read. She memorized what she couldn’t sound out. She learned to notice patterns about spaces and places and people that the rest of us skip right over because we’re too busy focusing on the details she could never see.

Back at Barracuda, she tells me the same thing she’s told me twenty times before.

“CHOP-A-TOOL-IS.” Crisp and clear.

I repeat it back. Three times for good measure.

Chop-a-tool-is. Chop-a-tool-is. Chop-a-tool-is.

And I know, with absolute certainty, that by tomorrow morning it will have evaporated from my brain like water on hot pavement. Because that is not how my brain works.

But she knows this street because it’s the location of her favorite dive bar, her regular gas station, her favorite taco joint that we’re standing outside of now. Because it’s one of the most famous streets in New Orleans, where parade floats line up and the port rises with its giant cranes and the Mississippi spills over during hurricanes. She knows it because she’s walked it and lived it and refused to not know its name simply because letters are too busy jumping around to be pinned down by her eyes.

In other words, she’s navigating NOLA’s streets — and 20-something life — her way. The way she built when nobody else’s way worked.

To finding our own ways,

Sue

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