9:44pm October 5, 2010

“Eventually, while I continued to believe that there was something indefinably wrong with me, I grew to understand that there was also something wrong with the way I was being treated. Some deep part of me must have known it was wrong to be humiliated and punished for something that was a natural and unchangeable part of my being. As parents, grandparents, teachers, and ophthalmologists conferred about possible ways to “help” me, I began to sense the presence of a plot. Since I did not fit the acceptable category of “sighted” or even the less acceptable but still comprehensible category of “blind,” I threw those who came into contact with me into confusion. I was a creature who existed between two concepts, and they strove hard to get me to fit into one or the other. “Blind” meant helplessness, irrationality, hopelessness, darkness, even an association with death itself. “Sighted” meant hope, rationality, capability, life. Given these choices, the adults around me tried to force me into the sighted mold. They did this partly by taking me to eye doctors who might be able to “cure” me, but mostly by simply denying that I could be anything other than sighted. Thus, the whole reality of my experience was being denied, and I was told that it did not exist. Part of me believed that I must be crazy and deficient to perceive things so differently than they did. But an older, pre-language part of myself realized that they were trying to deny my existence and therefore my life itself. They were trying to kill me! I then hypothesized that there was a world-wide conspiracy that was trying to do away with me, for some completely unfathomable reason. This feeling of mine was expressed by fear of and endless rage at my parents; I had frequent tantrums and kept running away from home. My parents and the school authorities decided I was deeply disturbed; I was sent in now for a new round of testing: psychological. I was given every test imaginable, including a brain scan, to see if my brain was damaged. I was taken in for counseling at a “child guidance” center. When that did not seem to work my parents committed me to a state psychiatric hospital for children. The year was 1962, and I was ten years old.”