greetings, and happy 4 AM to you where ever you are or something.
I’ve decided to start using the blogging feature for what it was originally intended to be used for, as I thought it a good idea to get some thoughts down somewhere, and maybe spark some sounding board type discussions between commenters.
anyways, before we get into the meat and potatos of this post, let me start off by telling you a bit about myself. My name’s Gabriel maduro, I’m a fairly recently turned 18 yearold as of writing, (which, by the way, is scary as hell), and I’ve just started a fiew things: 1. college, which, by the way, I’ve got to be at in about 4 and a half hours, and 2, this blind independant living course bassed out of the state I live in here in the US.
Here’s the thing about this program though. It’s supposed to simulate a communal living situation in which you live alongside, in my case, about 8 people. The 9 of us all have to fend for ourselves. Buying our own groceries with money we’ve got to source internally, while also juggleing a classload of at least 4 college classes at a university of our choice. Time management? all you friend. Fallbacks? nonexistent. *pauses*, shit. does it sound like I’m complaining? I genuinly don’t wanna make it sound as though this is a thing I was forced into or something, cause I knew exactly what I was doing when I filled out that form. The group of people I’ve got around me are amazing, and if you really need it, the staff help you figure things out. I’ve always considered what I’m doing at the second as the life version of a polar plunge, but realistically even that’s unfair. But I digress. The reason for the creation of this post in the first place is as follows. Growing up in the caribbean I was quite angry about what I called the situation blind people in the more developed world put themselves in. I didn’t have a choice growing up, and the fact people out there existed who did and did nothing for their own lives pissed me off to no end. Do I still believe that you’ve got a choice? Hell yeah I do, and nothing will change my mind on that. But do I understand why some people don’t do what needs to be done to live a semi-normal life? also yes. It’s fucking hard bro. I’m plagued by anxiety about what, or even if I’m going to eat on the dayly. I know that one impulsive amazon order and I won’t have fresh food for upwards of a week, and it’s terifying. But on the otherhand it also stems from a place of deep and heartborn dedication. I left my home country because I wanted to make a change, and that’s another one of those things no one’ll change my mind on.
in conclusion, let this be a bit of motivation for some. It’s never, and I do mean never too late to make a lifealtering change in your life. I’m a tiney unassuming person, and I’m well aware that it’s possible that something bad could happen to me while walking to and from college, or the grocery store, or a restaurant, or where ever really. But at the same time I understand it’s something I have, yes have to do if I want any kind of control over my own life what soever. It’s so easy, even borderline socially acceptable to rationalise staying in mom’s bassment untill age 45. "The job market is brutal." or "I’m just a socially awkward person." firstly, there’s nothing that stops us from learning the core basics of ILS and becoming a line cook at McDonalds, and 2, that social awkwardness doesn’t seem to stop you being a keyboard warrier on the internet. Go ahead. Call me an asshole, but it’s true. There are so many times where I’ve just wanted to give up, flop on the floor, and let this world, that’s clearly not built with us in mind go on without me, but I know I can’t, so I do what I can to prove the abelists who do all they can to make the afor mentioned mentality socially acceptable wrong and laugh in their faces, and I hope you all, of any age, will grow to do the same. Let’s fight them together. Thanks for reading.
3 responses to “and they said what about the world being easy?”
Well, I don’t think that way because it seems from your post that you think that blind people can do themselves things by will such as moving away and they just too lazy to do so. As they put themselves in those situations as you wrote, literally, and I think it’s very distant from the truth. Live with parents is not a VIP service but rather an unstructured time where you have no benefit to the society, you are not useful, you don’t develop any competency and competence, your talents never develop or expressed, have no romantic relationships or even experiences and experience at all aka never dating, even you can’t start a relationship because you don’t know where to go, you miss out on the stages what sighted young adults and also blind ones do, have no results in your life like careers or family or children, you have no role in the society, you never explore because you don’t know what have to, even if a family carry you somewhere then you’re not free, you have no valid structure (or how I can say) in the society like you can’t be a traditional wife or a feminist woman or a traditional man or a progressive man in your daily life, days are same and monotonous, you live in a low stimuli environment, and due to lack of stimuli you lose your interest toward the world, you can’t talk about anything because have no experiences and experience to talk about, days are flowing, you lose your track of time, your functions like sleep collapses, because days have no frame and / or activities, have no friends or have a very narrow, even abusive, or coercive, or ableist, or neglectful, or abandoning, social cyrcle, we can’t differentiate overprotection from those because even overprotection is a misleading term, because we shouldn’t focus on a supposed subjective good intent but rather the results, and outcomes shows that overprotection is a neglect because blind people have no resources to immerse in, just the sighted parent, they can’t pick up things visually like how to do something independently, as I commented above your other posts, so based on many people’ experience and experiences, it’s not an unique case, these people who are living with parents are extremely isolated and parents told them to just take responsibility for yourself and have no willpower while not providing tools to do so. And those people ended up in isolation has different reasons like suburban areas, psychology teaches them to cut off from bad people or peers or family (even professionals do this (not just pop articles) because they don’t know anything about blindness), problematic parents, unemploiment, not integrated into sighted society, lesser education, being poor people, lack of exams, poor education, and so on. Those people try to do something like learn a language or scrolling TikTok, but fortune is going to decide that it will be a hobby only or an entering value to workplace market. So. Well. It would be like imagine a child, I am going to be extreme intentionally to make it understandable, who grows up in a room or even went to school but lived in a room rest of their lives, even after school, has no sleepovers, or minimal ones, then adulthood arrives and people let them out and scold them that they can’t do anything. And, anyone who would hears this in prison or a dictatorship would say immediately that it’s torture but when we look to those sighted parents with blind people, the say that it’s just care. The only literature where I saw this ‘do it but have no tools but when you don’t do it then we punish you’ attitude is literature about concentration camps. So, talk with tough love, think through it very deeply before blaming anyone from a more comfortable and privileged position despite your past and previous suffering.
And I have some advice. Never give up. Unless you realy have to that is. Have you ever felt like you were just ready to run away? Sometimes I have felt that way. Just asking because you said you felt you just wanted to let the world go on without you, so that’s why I figured to ask.
Wow, this is a nice post. A lot of information.