Astrid’s Journal

Welcome to my journal. I have been an avid writer for almost as long as I can remember. I started with fictional stories, and later, around age eleven, first tried my hand at poetry. It was at around the same time that I started my first journal, which was, at the time, a hand-made paper book with Braille pages stuck in it. In 1999, I started keeping a journal on the computer. This was much easier, but there was the risk of computer crashes, and each time my computer did crash, I used to be worried about my journal. It however remained intact till May, 2003, when during a major computer crash I lost all my work from December, 2002 onwards, including all my writings in the diary since that date. After that, my diary never got the solid shape it’d had before. I do still have some offline diaries for specific purposes.

Another passion, however, demanded its time from me from the summer of 2002 on: the Internet. As soon as I got an Internet connection, I started surfing around the web, and later, started participating on forums and E-mail lists. My combined passion for the Internet and for writing, of course,
eventually led me to the online journal, which I first started in late 2002.

Openness has been an important issue in this respect: do you remain anonymous or not, and how much of yourself do you share on the web, theoretically for the entire world to read? My first online journal, I kept anonymously, and really personal entries used to be password-protected. I however
quickly realized that one’s never completely anonymous on the Internet - my relatives found out that “Elfenkind” was me, eventually -, and also decided against keeping a journal online and not taking full accountability for it. I therefore decided not to be anonymous in this journal, and to keep
my diary publicly viewable. As I got more online friends, I did do some journaling in password-protected or “friends only” posts, but the majority of my writing remains viewable to the whole world. Dealing with issues that are too personal to share on the web can also be done by not putting them online or by being cautious in how you share them. I know that my writings can and will be read by both strangers and relatives, and I’ve gotten many reactions to what I wrote in this journal. These, including critical ones, are welcome and valued. MOre recently, I’ve also been confronted with people feeling their privacy violated by my online writing. If you feel that’s happened to you, please do let me know.

Now, let me introduce myself. My name is Astrid van Woerkom and I was born on June 27, 1986 in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Because that is three months premature, I was placed in an incubator and had to be on oxygen. I remained in Sophia Children’s Hospital for 94 days. While there, I suffered several common preemie conditions, including a brain bleed (called IVH in medical jargon) and an eye condition that no-one ever spells correctly, called Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP). This condition caused me to to be severely visually impaired as a child and later to go blind from its complications.

I was initially sent to public school, but a few months before the end of my second year in Kindergarten, I transferred to a school for the visually impaired. I remained in special education until 1999, when I went to a public secondary school (high school) in my hometown of Apeldoorn, from
which I graduated in 2005. After that, I went for training at the rehab centre for the blind, which I finished in December, 2005. One month later, I moved from my parents’ home into an independent living training home for people with disabilities. While I was there, staff started noticing my difficult behaviors and we together decided to go to the local mental health centre for evaluation. This ended, in March of 2007, in my diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder. This diagnosis marked a change in my life on several grounds. For one thing, it meant that I would have to decide whether I felt autism was a bad thing that needed to be cured. I’d already taken a stand against cure before my diagnosis, and decided to stick with this belief after I myself was diagnosed. This, however, doet not mean I accept every autistic behavior I or others might exhibit, that I don’t think I have problems cause of my autism, or that I don’t need autism-related services. None of these assumptions are true and all of these could damage the lives of autistic people.

In 2006, I started college, first at Saxion in Deventer, in a programme called a foundation in applied psychology. In 2007, however, I decided to swtich to linguistics and transfer to Radboud Universtiy in Nijmegen. On August 1, 2007, I also moved to Nijmegen to live in an student apartment.