I feel really bad. All sorts of issues are spinning through my mind again, and they’re driving me crazy. I threw several horrible tantrums lately, and all started out over very little things and ended going about issues of blindness, having to hold on, becoming independent, and the question if something more than blindness is wrong with me. There are situations when I can explain all my issues by blindness stuff, but I well realise that my actual behaviour is not a blindness issue. It may be a reaction to it, but the way I react is not related to my blindness and is a problem in itself. I know that I cannot magically resolve all my problems by adjusting to blindness, but I know it would help a great deal if I learnt those “skills of blindness”. But I don’t know how I’m going to learn the skills of blindness, for my parents can’t teach me (they say, sometimes blaming my blindness and sometimes blaming my behaviour issues) and I’m busy enough just holding on. Oh, that doesn’t appear so of course, for academically I rub along fairly well (I have confidence in that this test week also went well), but… I don’t know… I just can’t go on like this… And at home… The folks expect me to move out “when she has enough of travelling by train”. As if it is that easy. I cannot even handle my current duties! But I have to hold on, to pretend to be fine, cause Mum wants to show off about her high school senior. She said that she also shows off about her 10th-grader, and that she isn’t just keeping up either (Sigrid repeated 9th and has real academic problems with some subjects). First, she shows off about Sigrid a lot less than about me, and second she doesn’t include her own difficult fight for making clear Sigrid’s abilities in her showing off – logically, cause she didn’t need to fight for that as much as she had for me. I feel pushed to just “rub along”, no matter how this is accomplished. If I graduate from high school this spring, that’s great – especially for beating the special ed folks’ ideas about me – no matter how much difficulty I’ve had there. (Of course it’s always good if a person graduates form high school.) We’ll just beat the low expectations the special ed folks had of me. Yeah, sure, but they don’t care how I’m doing so. And if the girl who, according to the special ed folks and the remedial educationalist who evaluated her in 1998, should’ve been educated on a school for the blind due to “the complexity of points of special interest”, goes to university next year, she’ll have beaten the negative attitudes others had about her, no matter how she’s doing. No-one seems to care that I don’t really rub along, because besides telling them, I have not shown in a way that’s significant enough that I don’t. What *is* going to make clear that I really can’t hold on?
Astrid
