Hold fast to your dreams...

Hold fast to your dreams,
For if dreams die,
Life is a broken winged bird
That cannot fly.

              -Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Langston Hughes was a beloved African American poet and writer from the Harlem Renaissance to his death in 1967.  I discovered him through the above poem, when I was fourteen.  And I needed him.  I was struggling with what life could hold for someone like me.

My home life as a child was a very unstable one due to alcoholism and the insecurities my parents had with the dwarfism.  This was many years before the Internet and all they were told about the dwarfism when I was a baby 
is I would be perfect for the circus.  When as a child all I could see of those like me were The Munchkins, and the actor Michael Dunn, who was well known for his role on Wild Wild West, it is very isolating.  But they were all I had to identify with. 

This didn't stop me from having friends though, or letting my height challenge keep me from doing what everyone else was doing.  I was determined it wouldn't.  However, outside my circle of friends, I had to deal with the insidious constant ridicule and meanness of both kids and adults.  With little help from my parents.

Then one day I came across the poem above.  I found all I could on Mr. Hughes.  And in so doing, I learned in great depth the terrible discrimination African Americans had faced and were enduring.  All this coinciding with the events of the Civil Rights movement and demonstrations of the 1950's and 1960's.  I read all I could about all of the lives of African Americans...and somehow, I felt less alone.  Our challenges were different, and yet, the same.

So in feeling less alone, I held fast to my dreams, and my determination to fly.

Hold fast to your dreams, my friends.