Astrid’s Journal

I was just reading an article on challenges faced by twice-exceptional children, that is, children who are intellectually gifted yet have special needs. The article holds a lot of significance to the issues I faced in school - and those I’m facing now that I’m out of school and trying to plan for the next so many years.

The author highlights the fact that often, children who are twice-exceptional, can compensate for their difficulties so well that their problems get unrecognized till they come to a point where they hit the wall and all their compensatory skills fail. With me, of course, it’s been the other way round for many years - I was thought to be unintelligent by the schools for the blind cause my emotional/behavioural difficulties were so obvious that they were masking my intellectual ability -, but I have felt for a long time that there was a pendulum effect going on here: that, starting by 1999 when I left the school for the blind and went to regular high school, I was supposed to be doing alright. This was only agravated by the fact that I did get high marks in the early grades - and later also got above-average marks if I tried hard enough. Ir remained unrecognized that I was using my ability to learn quickly and without much repetition to compensate for both my intrinsic academic difficulties - never reading faster than 95 or so words per minute (which may be slow but not extremely slow for a braille reader) or having more difficulty conceptualizing graphics (which may not be “normal” but was an issue for me), for instance - and the problems due to accessibility issues, such as getting books rather late or not having films described (which never happens here). That in itself does not matter - it doesn’t matter how you achieve something, if you achieve it -, but it does matter that compensating takes a lot of energy and even then may be failing, for instance, when you can’t get around graphics or when you’re dealing with material that isn’t often read repeatedly, like works of fiction for language classes. Of course, I’m willing to pour extra energy into things I feel are important or that I’m interested in - I mean, I considered (and still somewhat consider) majoring in American studies, which involves a lot of fiction reading -, but I refuse to buy into the idea that we as people with disabilities are obligated to pour extra energy into everythiing. We are, in order to achieve an equal position to the non-disabled, but no-one can require a person to get a Ph.D. solely because he or she has the intelligence to - and whether that person has an identifiable disability or not, doesn’t even matter, although some people within the disability communtiy would like us to believe it by for example calling the blind “college-bound” without realizing that only 25% of the general population have college degrees. It is one of these concepts I have a lot of difficulty with, having seen in the last eighteen months or so that I do have limitations - whether that is normal for a blind person with my IQ or not -, and sometimes it makes me want to drop any effort at ever getting a college degree or becoming employed in a challenging job. I know that I want that degree and that I don’t want to get a low-level job or live on disability for the rest of my life, so I still pursue the goal, but I pursue it because I want it and not because I would be a shame to the entire blind community if I don’t. Or at least, that’s what I say, but within me of course there are still the one who wants to prove that she deserves the Competent Blind Adult degree (which I don’t) and the one who has had enough of compensating and just wants to sit on her ass. However, I know I can help both by learning to be truly realistic about my situation - that is far more than my intelligence and my blindness combined.

Went to my parents and sister yesterday. It went so-so, but what didn’t go well, was my fault. My father couldn’t keep from asking me about studying, and, because I haven’t yet been able to locate interesting community college courses, I decided to tell them about my efforts at learning about college studies for when I go there definitively. I told about philsophy and linguistics in Nijmegen and also mentioned my interest in journalism, which however is usually given at a lower level college - or you would have to do Dutch at the university level, which requires a lot of literature (fiction) reading, which I don’t like. My mother said she believed the University of Amsterdam has a journalism programme, so I decided to ask my father. He was able to dig up info on something called communication studies, which seems similar to journalism but at the university level. It’s given in Amsterdam and Nijmegen. That would be really cool, but I keep open the lower level college route - though I most likely wouldn’t do that, cause I know I would like intellectual challenge. I’m scared that I keep it too open according to my father’s wishes, that he wants me to close the possibility in its entirety, cause, after all, now I have a university-level alternative. I just don’t want to decide too quickly - I’ve done that once before.

My mother seems to favour philosophy at the university level, and so does my sister. At least, that’s the impression I got when she kept saying that hardly any journalist had studied journalism (or communication studies, for that matter) and that additional knowledge is an advantage. She also said that you’d better do something with which you can become more than just a journalist - to which I agree, cause who knows whether I still want to become a journalist in five years -, but I don’t see why that disqualifies communication studies, which, being a university-level course, is usually pretty broadly oriented - unlike, indeed, journalism at the lower level.

An exciting thing, by the way, is that you can pretty easily combine philosophy with another major. The way it works, I gather, is that you first get your fourndation course in that other subject and then continue with a shortened philsophy programme. That way, the website says, you can graduate with two majors in six years. It would be exciting in itself, but I’m not sure if I could deal with so much coursework - or how much it is actually. It would be something to inquire about at university.

Am I still in a difficult situation with my parents? I still sometimes feel I am and find it hard to react normally to my parents. Mum called again today, asking me if I was coming to them this weekend. I will go to my parents on Sunday to celebrate my sister’s birthday. Mum asked if I was going to stay overnight. I said I wasn’t, and gave as a reason that I have to be at training home on Monday morning by 9:00 AM. The actual reason is that I just feel uncomfortable about it. Why do I? I still can’t seem to let go of the conflict of four weeks ago. FOUR WEEKS! Isn’t this all irrational? I used to be the one keeping the lines open, while my parent sinitially did not, but now it’s me who makes a fuss of what’s supposed to be nothing. I hope it isn’t going to show on Sigrid’s birthday party.

I’ve been reading the progress report on 2005 and the introduction to one of my journals - pretty similar content. It got me thinking about the current situation and how, mostly, I did return to square one emotionally. The reasons for not going to Nijmegen now - damn it that Apeldoorn doesn’t have a higher level college - were mostly practical: my still lacking in daily living skills and, planning skills quite a bit, the fact that I’ve not at all figured out how much assistance I will require once living on my own (ie. whether I can learn to do things people always used to do for or with me independently), even now having poor college arrangement skills (but they could’ve been workable cause the student counsellor is great), and doubts as to what to do for college, ie. university or another type of four-year college, full-time or part-time (depends a lot on how well I’ll learn to manage my housekeeping, currently even a part-time schooling would be difficult), what to major in. In late March, I summarized them into a list of about fourteen statements detailing my curent situation that I don’t consider fit for starting to make arrangements for college (the ones like learning my way around etc.) now.

That, however, does not mean that the decision did not have emotional components. Not in the sense people suspect me of getting it emotional components - ie. emotional dependence -, but rather opposite: that I was, and am, greatly troubled with what my parents, my acquaintances (even Amy, Sarah and the others who used to support me but are now most likely going to let me down) and the American blindness movement think of me. I want to make my own decisions - that are as non-conventional as what to major in at college - and to define my own situation, not what people think I should decide or what my situation is assumed to be like. I want to see that I *can* do my housekeeping in a reasonable time (it now still takes me a lot of time) and still keep energy to do schoolwork (that’s also why I do want to start going to community college as soon as possible), I want to know what alternative techniques I can use for things my parents have been doing for me till way into March or even April, I want to see that I can navigate college. Fortunately, the student counsellor agreed with my decision and I can keep in touch with her in order to get information in preparing for university.

One thing I definitely need to do, is to get to know blind people in real life. I know hardly anyone, and those I do know are rehab students, who mostly became blind later in life, which is both a disadvantage and an advantage to them. I cannot believe what the American blind movement says when their situation appears to be so much different from mine, and yet at the same time, I know there must be independent, successful blind people here, too. I got to meet Sevinc last week. She’s a blind young adult (a few years older than me) living in my city. She used to be a training home client and is now living on her own and going to college. Even though in some ways I would not want to, and don’t plan to, become like her - eg. she’s studying at a community college for the blind, while I plan to resume regular education -, I feel that in some ways she’s still ahead of me. It partly makes me feel ashamed - haven’t I learnt to be independent yet, after eight months of training? -, but it also motivates me to want to learn more skills. It motivates me to finally look at my situation as it is and try to improve it.

Looking at the situation as it is, is a very difficult topic for me. Ever since I found myself having made progress at rehab, in October or November or so, I’ve been exaggerating this progress, thinking I’d now achieved independence and success. Well, I hadn’t, but I could pretend, emotionally, that I had. I had my reasons to, one of them being that, indeed, rehab is not as great as the Americans portray their rehab centres, and I didn’t want to be considered “traditional” (now that I think everyone will let me down anyway, I don’t know if I care). In any case, I couldn’t keep on pretending. By early February, I already realized that just because I saw myself as a person who could do everything just as fine as a sighted person could, didn’t mean I did. And by late March, the whole issue escalated, leaving me in some ways almost at square one. Not practically, of course - I still have my housekeeping skills, for instance -, but emotionally. I now have to pick up the pieces, and that doesn’t mean to say that practical expectations don’t listen to emotional problems - as I said in November or so -, but it does mean deciding that I still want to progress, and am going to learn to reach my ultimate goal, which is still the same as it was last year.

My mother called me yesterday asking if I’d bought a certain gift for my sister, who had her birthday yesterday but is in Rome so that we’re going to celebrate it next week. She also asked me how I was doing, and I noticed that I was still finding it hard to respond normally - I keep expecting her to want to hear something about “using my brains” cause that was what she asked me the last time she called, and I feel that while the interesting, intellectual things I do matter, there is more to life than “using one’s brains”. So I just said that I was fine and was going to a a fitness centre’s open house today (yesterday). She seemed to find it interesting enough, but I still felt kind of weird about it. How do I relate to my mother when I’m supposed to be “just a visitor who happens to be her daughter” but I guess that both of us feel like a mother-daughter relationship creates a different position, especially when you’re of my age. I cannot permit myself to have the same relationship with my mother that
she has with hers, because I’m still too young for that. It’s been only four months since I moved out of her house and a difference of opinions, no matter how important, doesn’t alter that. My parents seem to have agreed to disagree about my decisions - and of course this is not the first time, cause rehab created as much controversy -, and are still accepting me despite our conflict, but the simple fact that they probably know now that I’ll stick with my decisions, even if my parents disagree, has changed the situation for all of us. “Responsibility” is my parents’ device as far as parenting is concerned, but responsibility as in making one’s own decisions and seeing what comes from it oneself - if, after five years, I appear to have ruined my life, it’s my own fault -, is something totally different from responsibility for making sure you do as expected - the kind of responsibility I’ve hated ever since finding out about it.

Of course, you can’t expect a seven-year-old to take responsibility in the first sense - and, should I have ruined my life, people might’ve thought that you can’t do it with a nineteen-year-old. One always needs some accountability - ie. responsibility in the second sense - when one is a child or an adolescent. I have not broken with any form of accountability, in that I’m still willing to listen to what my parents, training home staff, university people and anyone else in a form of authority, has to say. The only way in which I refuse to be accountable nowadays is that of my parents - and only them - making the decision of how I’m going to arrange my life and then making it my responsibility to do it. They are not the only adults important in my life and they are not the ones to make decisions for me, cause I’m myself the one to do that, being over eighteen.

It was not an illegal, or even unethical, decision of my parents, when they kicked me out of the house three weeks ago becaus eof a difference of opinions about such fundamental things as training home, college and all that. Parents are required, till a person is 21, to provide food and shelter if needed, but I had both, and, as long as parents don’t deprive their children under 21 of these means, it’s not more than reasonable that they can set limits. Even though training home staff disagreed, I can see the reasonability in their setting the limit that, when I don’t make their decisions, or when I’m acting behaviourally disordered, or whatever the reason was behind their kicking me out of the house, I’m not welcome in their house. This falls, for a person who has food and shelter, under responsibility in the first sense: making your own decisions and seeing their consequences.

Of course, my conviction that I could do without my parents if they were to stick with whatever decision they made - it’s not quite clear to me -, is most likely not true. On April 22, 23 and 24, I felt an intense loneliness because I knew that I had no-one besides my parents and my sister. Now I’ve not felt accepted, let alone loved, by any of them for a few years - I attribute that to adolescence -, but I knew they could at least keep the illusion of caring about me and I was willing to buy into it. I have great difficulty doing that now, which seems to be at the core of my own difficulties communicating with them now. Whether it’s due to common adolescent loneliness or not, after our conflict of three weeks ago, I find it hard to establish a feeling of being accepted, again. Whether anything that may or may not have contributed to the conflict, relates, I don’t know - I’m the mistress of putting things into contexts that really aren’t there -, but it feels as if it was only the climax of a conflict (or sense of it, at least on my part) that’s lasted for quite a while.

I also remain the mistress of filling in hidden meanings, and so I find it hard to answer normally to a question as simple as how I’m doing, when my mother previously meant whether I engaged enough (for her liking) in intellectual activities. I don’t want my intelligence highlighted all the time - it’s one of my hot buttons and has been for many years -, and I don’t want anyone to think that the only way I can do anything interesting is by involving myself intellectually (which is one of my ways of spending leisure time, of course), so I get vigilant when such connotations are present, and when I previously found them present, I am vigilant the next time I get the same question, which is how I’m doing. I fortunately caught that feeling in time and was able to react neutrally by making the comment about the fitness centre, which was, indeed, the only interesting thing I’d been doing lately, so it wasn’t a lie or selection anyway. I don’t know how it came across, but I’m not going to allow myself to fill in meanings again.

Over the past three weeks, a lot has happened that has much significance to both my emotional difficulties and my behaviour issues, and their interconnectedness. I don’t feel I can describe everything in detail, but I do have to get my journal back on track in order to even keep it going.

The first thing that happened is that I had some major conflicts with my family. It started out about college and training home, but eventually, with the help of some training home staff and a few weeks’ time, got mostly settled in what I’ll think of as an agreement to disagree - and I basically don’t care whether what my parents said they now think about training home and all this, is actually true, if they’re not going to make a fuss out of it again. The conflict drew us somewhat apart and that also allows me to take a distance of not caring all that much what my family will think about me, for so long as I can walk their floors for a visit without fighting.

That is something partly different. My father had at first kicked me out of his house, but apparently had not meant it seriously - like he never means it seriously when he kicks me out of his house. What he had meant, however, he said last Friday, was that my behaviour difficulty got him to say these things. And there’s where a change that I think has occurred, or is about to occur, in our relationship, is concerned: that you aren’t going to take as much from a visitor who happens to be your daughter as you’re going to take from your child. I think that, even though I can’t remember starting the swearing three weeks ago - which was when my father told me to go out of his house -, it took him less to kick me out than it normally does. This also means that I have to be extra cautious when visiting my parents now; after all, I’m *visiting* them, not “coming home”, and that requires better behaviour.

That’s not to justify my acting ot when I still lived with my parents, but it is to say that it’s understandable that now that I live on my own, my parents are going to accept less of me, and I have to take more responsibility. It does, unfortunately, scare me, in that I have no idea whether I can keep the peace. I’ve screwed up at acquaintances’ houses more than once, but when I did, our getting along was just over, something that isn’t going to be that easy with family. So it all creates a rather strange relationship of still remaining family but not the GFG (problem child) I could once be.

The whole stuff also shines light on the interrelation between emotional and behavioural problems - if it didn’t do that already. I’ve always felt myself being in a strange kind of dual role, in that I, unintentionally, abused my parents and sister - but ninety percent of abuse is unintentional -, but at the same time feel my own emotional difficulties - not as in being a victim of some kind, let alone of my parents or sister, but I still do have my difficulties. It is being signified by my being kicked out of my parents’ house, with my father saying he didn’t want anything to do with me anymore. At first, everyone considered my father crazy, cause it was thought to be about our disagreement about college, training home, etc. Everyone was sympathetic of me and rather negative about my father - too negative, in my opinion, but you can’t easily avoid the “if you agree with me, you disagree with him” situation in these kinds of conflicts. Then the issue was settled and it became clear that it was my behaviour disturbance that had led my father to kick me out - something that is completely understandable. Now how do I cope? Last week Thursday, when it became clear that my father didn’t intend to truly kick me out, I was still very troubled emotionally with the whole thing and found it hard to believe him - he had said the thing to a training home staff member, not me - and was still dealing with my angry feelings for the whole conflict. Then on Friday I decided to check his opinion with my father and was told that he, indeed, hadn’t meant it and was still fine with my course of action re training home - or had been convinced to be by the staff member -, but that he’d said the things about not wanting anything to do with me because of my behaviour issues. That confused me greatly, cause now, not only did I have to stop feeling bad about the conflict - after all, it was supposedly over -, but I also had to admit to having generated this degree of anger in my father - and that being understandable. In other words, I have to acknowledge that I’m an abuser while still also having my own emotional difficulties. This is nothing new to me, but it does get some new context with what has been happening over the past three weeks.