Prom King and Queen: Stories from our fourth Proton Prom

In this week’s episode, we highlight two stories from this year's Proton Prom, Story Collider's annual fundraiser and celebration of science storytelling.

Part 1: Pamela Toh is dead set on being the “bad kid” at school.

Pamela Toh is an aspiring writer and graduate student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai where she conducts research on how the brain and body coordinate to elicit the symptoms of PTSD. Originally from Singapore, Pamela moved to NYC after completing her undergraduate studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa (because the proximity to sun and surf was simply too much to bear). When not hunched over a lab bench, Pamela can be found coveting the latest LEGO sets, or in a yoga studio trying to correct her bad posture.

Part 2: On a family vacation to Disney, Matthew Dicks becomes more and more frustrated by his daughter’s strange behavior.

Matthew Dicks is the internationally bestselling author of six novels and three nonfiction titles, including Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, Change Your Life Through the Art of Storytelling, and Stories Sell: Storyworthy Strategies to Grow Your Business and Brand. His novels have been translated into more than 25 languages worldwide. When not hunched over a computer screen, he fills his days as an elementary school teacher, storyteller, comedian, blogger, wedding DJ, minister, and communications consultant. He’s been teaching for 25 years and is a former West Hartford Teacher of the Year and a Connecticut Teacher of the Year finalist. Matthew is a record 60-time Moth StorySLAM champion and 9-time GrandSLAM champion whose stories have been featured on their nationally syndicated Moth Radio Hour. Matthew is the founder of Speak Up, a Hartford-based storytelling organization that produces shows throughout New England. He teaches storytelling and public speaking worldwide to individuals, corporations, school districts, hospitals, universities, and more.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

My parents are adorable, and that’s a fact. They went to kindergarten together, they've been best friends for almost 50 years, and they used to keep a collaborative journal where they would write down things their kids would say.

One entry wrote, “Pamela's been asking me some very interesting questions. How long do we have to wait until today? Can we ever stop counting? Do we feel wind because the earth is spinning?” I think that last one's pretty good for a four year old.

Another entry wrote, "I don't know why but Pamela's favorite phrase is 'I don't like you'.”

Because my parents were amazing but I was a little shit. I had such an awful attitude. You couldn't tell me nothing. I never did what I was told, and definitely not homework. That became an issue when I started going to school.

Now, I went to kind of a mean school. I think when I say that, people think the students were mean. No, no. The teachers were the mean ones.

Pamela Toh shares her story at Caveat in New York, NY on March 20, 2024. Photo by Zhen Qin.

So when I was 10, I had a teacher who was particularly mean. As usual, I didn't do my homework. And, as usual, I just said I left it at home. 10 year old logic. What are you going to do?

So me and a few other students were made to stand at our desks for the duration of class. But not before this teacher went around to each and every one of us and searched our bags to see if we were lying about not bringing our homework.

I remember I watched as this man, tall and lanky, with hair like a pit of spikes, stalked through these statue frozen children in uniforms like he was some kind of warden. There was only the whir of the fans, the sound of his interrogation as to how and why we came to be such failures.

He got to the desk of a student who was stood a little ways in front of me, someone that I was frequently punished alongside. And this grown man picked up this child's backpack, flipped it over and shook the contents onto the floor.

He reached down and picked up a crumpled sheet of paper and waved the blank homework in front of this boy's face, taunting him.

He usually screamed at us, but this time, his voice dripping with this sinister calm, he just asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

And this boy, his voice barely a whisper, this was a secret he never told anyone before, he said, "I want to be a scientist."

And this young man, who had barely started growing up himself, threw his head back and laughed in this boy's face and said, "You have to be smart to be a scientist," as he let that crumpled piece of paper fall to the floor.

Watching this as a 10 year old, it never occurred to me that anything he was saying might be untrue. Your teachers teach you, that means they're telling you the truth, that scientists are capital S smart and that there's something capital W wrong with you.

And when you're made to be the failure, you have two options. One, you allow yourself to be reformed by the cruelty of individuals you do not respect. Or, two, you lean into it.

And I leaned into it. I was that kid giving people piercings in the bathroom with a safety pin. We had a couple teachers who would make you stand in the hallway if you didn't do the work and I would just walk out when they got there, like I have nothing for you and you have nothing for me.

And every day when I got home from school, my mom would ask me, “What did you learn today?”

And every day my answer was always, “Nothing.” Nobody was safe to ask questions to anymore.

I held on to that mentality, that shield, all throughout primary and secondary school, all throughout graduating at the bottom of my class, and all through not being able to get into any schools.

And my parents, the kindest, most supportive, most patient people in the world, they saw all the garbage that I had to offer, and they said, “Let's try again somewhere else.”

My dad leveraged his job to get his company to move us from Singapore to Dubai, because geographical cures are still cures. But my mentality around school and educators hadn't changed, so it was all the same to me.

Now, I spent a full year doing absolutely nothing before moving, so I was 17 when I started high school. By then, half my arm was covered in tattoos, half my head was shaved, and in this hoity toity private preparatory school, I was the only one like me.

And old habits die hard, so I promptly failed my first chemistry exam. I got probably a 10% on it because exams were my favorite time to nap.

My chemistry teacher asked me to see her in her office after class. And I thought, “Here we go again. Another lecture from another teacher on what a waste of space I am.”

I dragged my feet to her office, already anticipating the venom that I was used to, that I thought I was immune to, and it felt like someone had poured concrete into my chest. This was supposed to be my second chance, but here I was again, another failure, another disappointment.

It felt like the concrete had risen to my throat as I sank deeper into that office chair, frozen, just like that day when I was 10.

I looked down at my exam, waiting for the lashing, thinking, "I've been in this position most of my life. There is nothing you can say that I haven't heard before."

And she said, "How can I teach you better? Because I know you can do better than this." She said something I hadn't heard before.

The resonance of her question shattered me. Her words echoed through the abyss inside my chest and shook my entire being.

“Me? You're asking me? What do I know? I'm a kid. I don't know anything. You can look at this exam and see that I don't know anything. You can ask anyone who has ever tried to teach me and they will tell you the truth, that I am hopeless. How do you know I can do better than this? When all I've shown you is wreckage, how can you still see the remains of a ship?”

The dam in my chest broke open and I bawled in her office that day.

After that, she kept asking me questions, more questions that disarmed me, more things I hadn't heard before. “Why is the sky blue? Why does it change colors? What is light? What is fire? Why can't we un toast toast?”

I saw her questions and returned the same, and eventually I started engaging with what I was being taught.

Now, I still had zero work ethic, but she taught me how to ask questions. How to use them like tethers to connect with the world around and within me. How to hold on until I found an answer.

That chemistry teacher was the first research scientist I ever interacted with. She'd gotten her PhD in biochemistry before going into education. She was the one who got me on to the path to becoming a scientist myself. Because, it turns out, and I'll let you in on a little secret, science isn't about being Capital S smart. It's about having the curiosity to ask questions and the persistence to find their answers.

That's why now, at the end of the day, when I leave the lab and I call my mom, I can't wait to tell her all the things I've learned.

Part 2

It's a little after midnight. I'm standing at the baggage carousel at the airport wondering who the hell decided to call this a carousel. Carousel has painted horses and smiling children and calliope music and this is just a conveyor belt, dragging around bags of dirty laundry around and around and around. Even the bags are not having fun.

Matthew Dicks shares his story at Proton Prom at Caveat in New York, NY June 10, 2024. Photo by Zhen Qin.

And I realized why Dante stopped at the ninth circle of hell, because he has not visited this location, Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, Connecticut on a Tuesday night after midnight. It is an awful place.

But the problem really isn't that it's an awful place. The problem is that my bags are not on the carousel, because no person has ever, in the history of the universe, had their bag come off first on the carousel. I'm convinced that there are airport staff that have decoy bags. They just sort of toss them out onto the carousel to keep us from getting so enraged that we want to kill them. So we're just watching fake bags go round and round while we wait for our real bags to come around.

But even this isn't the problem. The problem is where I was 12 hours ago. I was standing on Main Street, USA, Disneyland, like the most glorious and magical place there ever was, colors and lights and music. It was fantastic. When I decided to bring my family to Disney World, my friends told me that I was crazy to go in August. They said it would be hot, the crowds would be ridiculous, and it would be expensive.

And they weren't wrong. It was 100 degrees every single day of the vacation. It was two hour lines for two minute rides, and sometime tomorrow, I'm going to have to sit my wife down and explain that after this trip, only one of our two children can go to college now, and she will be choosing which one that is.

But what my friends didn't tell me was that Disney is actually a real magical place. That when you bring your kids there and they see Cinderella's Castle for the first time, or they ride the "It's a Small World" and listen to that song, or they shake Mickey's hand and you see their faces, it is worth every penny. And it convinces me that all of my friends are soulless assholes.

Even this is not really the problem. The problem is I'm in this anti magical location, which is the baggage carousel. I'm only here because of the three people I chose to bring to Disney, my family. Three people who I love all the time but don't like a whole lot of the time. Right now, I really don't like them because I'm at the baggage carousel.

I do not pack a bag. I take a small bag that I bring onto a plane and I put it in the overhead compartment. And when I get off the plane, I walk by all the losers who are stupid enough to pack a bag and put it into the baggage carousel.

But now I'm with the losers. They are, like, my people. I chose these losers and they're dragging me down and it's killing me. My family empties their closets into bags, like enormous bags. My son brought nine bathing suits for seven days of vacation. I have one bathing suit all together in my entire life. None of this makes sense to me. They are like anchors dragging me down and killing me.

As an author, I am often asked, who is the hero in my life? I know they're looking for the literary hero, but my answer is always me. I am the fucking hero of my life. The fact I get anything done with these three human beings attached to me is a goddamn miracle. I cannot believe what I manage to accomplish.

So I'm standing here with these people that I cannot stand waiting for this baggage carousel to finish going round and round when my daughter Clara steps up to me. She says to me, "Hey, Dad, can I go talk to that girl over there?"

It's making me crazy because none of my family are normal in any way whatsoever. My wife can't tell the difference between an hour and a minute, so we're late at all times. My son has no sense of urgency at all. He has found a way to pee slowly. Like water leaves his body slower than any human being and he loves every single minute of it.

But my daughter is the worst. She is miserable beyond compare. She talks to everyone. Like, my wife talks to everyone, but she talks to everyone at Disney. Every single mother with an infant, she's on that woman. “What's the baby's name? How old is the baby? Cesarean or natural? How did it go for you?” All of these questions come out of my daughter's mouth on a routine basis.

She's taking pictures with the princesses, Ariel and Belle on one side. You take the picture, you shuffle the hell out of the way for the next kid. My daughter turns to Ariel and says, “So how is your day going? Is there something I can do to make it better?” She makes me crazy.

And when she's not talking to people, she has a book in her hand all the time. And her books are like four inches thick. It's a brick. She brings a brick into Disney. And while there's a million things to look at, if she's not talking to a mother with a baby or riding a ride, she's reading a book. A book she's already read four times before, and now she's reading it for the fifth time in the middle of Disneyland and it's making me crazy.

Now, she's standing next to me and saying, "Hey, Dad, can I go talk to that girl leaning up against the pillar?"

And I look. She's like nine years old. She's about Clara's age. And I think, "No. Leave the girl alone. She's suffering like the rest of us. She's apathetic, she's upset, she's distressed. Just let people suffer in silence for once. Stop talking.”

But I can't do it because it's been seven days of this and I've just given up. I'm like, “Fine, go talk to the girl.”

But as she walks away, I think to myself, “Why is my daughter always the weird one?”

So, eventually, the bags come. They're enormous. They're like shipping containers. They come around, there's like 19 of them. Every item of clothing my family owns comes out of the baggage carousel. I have to get a cart. Even though everything is on wheels, there's more bags than there are humans, so I have to get like that trolley and pile it up.

Eventually, I get it all together and I extract my daughter from that poor soul and I get my son. He's in the corner licking something. I get my wife. We're all moving towards the exit, finally, when this guy stands in front of me.

He steps in front of me and I think, “Who the hell is this?”

Then he leans into me like, “Oh, this is gonna be something.” And then he gets even closer and I'm like, “I am ready to go.”

And he says to me, “That was my daughter that your daughter was talking to.”

And I think, “Oh, God, what have you said, Clara? Please don't let it be a caesarean section.”

He leans in closer and he says to me, “I am so impressed by what your daughter just did.” He said, "My daughter is so shy she could never speak to a stranger in her life." He said, "But your daughter went over there and just introduced herself and, in like a minute, they were having a beautiful conversation."

He says, "I hope and pray that someday my daughter can do what your daughter can do."

And now I hate this man so much. He's like held a mirror up to me to show me how ugly I really am, but at the same time I sort of love him too. Because he has managed to see my daughter through eyes that are better than mine.

And what I don't know now but I will find out two years from now is that Clara has autism, that she gets diagnosed with autism. Suddenly, a lot of the things that I thought were annoying and frustrating and ridiculous make complete sense to me.

People with autism, they're sort of all over the spectrum. It affects people in different ways. For my daughter, when she looks at someone, she has no idea what to think about them. She cannot read body language. She can't read facial expressions. She can't read satire. She can't make inferences. But she wants to connect with people more than anyone I have ever met.

And because she spent the first 10 years of her life in the company of my wife, who cannot stop talking to anyone in the world, she has taken on all of these strategies where she talks to everyone even though she doesn't know what the hell they're thinking, or what they're feeling, or what they might be thinking about her.

And for my daughter with autism, that means that every single sound in the world is all in her head at all times. That she can hear the sounds of the ice machine and the bird tweeting and the person speaking and the car driving by all at the same volume at all times in her head.

Bright lights are terrible for her, which turns out to be nothing but Disneyland. And so you bring your autistic girl to Disneyland and it is kind of a horror show for her, which is why she carries a brick around, it turns out. Because somewhere along the way, around the age of six or seven, she discovered that the way I can deal with all of this is to take a book and read it and retreat into fiction. That is the strategy that she has found for herself that allows her to cope with this world.

All of these things that I thought were weird and stupid and annoying as hell are still annoying as hell, but are now completely understandable to me.

So when people ask me today, which they do, who is my hero? And I know they want me to answer a literary hero, my answer is always Clara. Thank you.