I don’t know what I shall write… too many questions keep spinning through my mind and it’s all sooo complicated… I wrote on the BlindKid listserv about the articles in Future Reflections I’d read… Some of the responses are more confusing than I felt before… Of course, the post I wrote was more personal than that it actually made a meaningful statement. I know it said more of me than of the articles, but that’s what even complicates things further… I’m not disagreeing with the articles cause I feel blind foks shouldn’t be expected to accomplish great things. Many times have I described the articles as “depressing”. Not cause I don’t believe folks can accomplish these things, but simply cause I don’t. Some of these articles describe the accomplishments of blind toddlers: some things, which I at almost 18 haven’t even accomplished. That in itself - being behind in daily living skills - is depressing. But so are those feelings that I have… it all makes me feel as if I’m less worthy than the blind folks in the articles (remember, they are REAL people), just cause I haven’t accomplished what those people/children have. At first I liked NFB attempts to educate society of the capabilities of blind people - some people have just such exaggeratedly negative ideas about what the blind can do. But now there are blind people who seem to tell me that… uhm, what did I want to say?? It’s confusing… can’t follow myself…
One of the folks who replied to my posts apparently had read my article What I Realised and she was more critical of the conclusion I drew then of the rest of the article. (Well, apparently she didn’t notice that the article described three years, but that’s a whole other thing.) She said it’s no-one’s right to be helped. That’s true as how she explained it: that it’s a gift when someone offers help to somebody else. At least, if I have to regard that saying as that help is not something one should take for granted, but that I should be really appreciative when somebody offers help. Hmmm, it’s confusing. The people who replied to my posts just combined many, many statements, all of which are true but some that seem to be totally contradictory… In some way, for example, the statements that it’s no-one’s right to be helped and the statement that one shouldn’t pretend not to need help indeed don’t contradict each other - when one asks somebody to help him/her, one indeed should be very appreciative when that help is offered and not think it’s “just one’s right”. However, I may be able to theoretically - linguistically and philosophically - be able to prove that the statements people made don’t contradict each other, but practically they make up some totally incomprehensible network of statements and hence “rules”, that apply in so many again different situations that I can’t make any sense out of it.
A while back, I started with an update on “What I Realised”. I started the article with the statement that there are two very essential things one should realise in order to be successful as an “integrated” person with a disability: first, that it ain’t bad to have so-called “special needs” (the NFB folks would probably totally disagree there), and second that one should however still be as “normal” as possible. Even if these two things are the only two basic realisations one should have, they seem to be contradictory, and if they aren’t, the combination of the two realisations has made me feel extremely bad.
I also re-read my article The Essential Feature of Blindness. I feel ashamed about it… Boy, do I ever devalue competent blind folks! Mostly, cause to me it seems too much as if I regard my own difficulties as difficulties every blind person has. The - very short - article is meant to display that it is impossible to give an essential feature of blindness in two ways: first, the assumptions of sighted people regarding blind people’s inabilities (folks asking if my house has stairs, etc.), and second, the things I can’t do, although I feel their essence ain’t sight. And mainly the second one is to be ashamed of: I can’t do something of which the essence ain’t even sight, while I actually should be able to with some mystical compensatory skill be able to do even the things of which the essence is sight!
Anyway, I feel totally confused… and extremely bad… What I realised in the summer of ‘02 and then was happy about that I’d realised it apparently is something one shouldn’t realise… and how on Earth can I appreciate the sighted folks’ helpfulness, while I apparently am not allowed to need that help? I have really no idea of how this all tallies.
Astrid
