About the Meaning of Blindness when You Have Additional Disabilities

The new Thought Provoker 104, once again, made me think about my own situation and the blind movement’s rigid ideas about what blind people are like. It is about a guy with multiple disabilities being angry cause a group of blind people are making generalized statements about what blindness means and doesn’t mean. The underlying [...]

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Local Elections

Man, it’s five days after the local elections last Tuesday, and I’ve still not expressed my joy yet: the Socialist Party has more than doubled the number of seats in municipal councils throughout the country! the Labour Party (PvdA) has also won considerably. GroenLinks, the other socialist party besides the SP, has lost slightly, but [...]

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Yet More on Social Interaction Difficulties

So, last Monday the training home staff were having their monthly discussion on me and they collectively decided I shouldn’t say I have a doorknob’s social skills anymore. They seem to think I’m not so bad at this after all, and I can follow their reasoning, in that mostly I know the rules of social [...]

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Thoughts about Social Skills and a Scheduled Discussion

This afternoon, I had a scheduled discussion that for once went pretty well, even though I’d not remembered the plan and had forgotten most of the “practice” rules (stuff like introing myself that I don’t need to do at every discussion but that I’m supposed to need to train). In advance, I’d listed in my [...]

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Thoughts on Negative Feelings, Uninvolvement in Activities, and Participation in Society

In the book on visual impairment I’m currently reading, I found an interview with a then 21-year-old woman, born blind, who had seemingly always been completely integrated in society. She’d been in special ed for two years in around 1980 cause at the time apparently, blind children couldn’t be taught braille and the like by [...]

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