Who we know ourselves to be, depends largely on the story we tell ourselves about who we are. Unbeknownst to the artist, the inability to express his emotions verbally led to self-portraiture as a means to express visually what his words could not. The inability to express emotions verbally typically would imply a deficient interior life, however, Coombs shows us through self-portraiture that he can use pictures to truly speak a thousand words.