10:16am July 25, 2013

➸ Urocyon's Jaunts: Heroification and Silencing

disabledtalk:

“Teachers have held up Helen Keller, the blind and deaf girl who overcame her physical handicaps, as an inspiration to generations of schoolchildren. Every fifth grader knows the scene in which Anne Sullivan spells water into young Helen’s hand at the pump. At least a dozen…

Not just every fifth grader.

My shrink when I was 14 figured out the extent of my language problems, but didn’t know how to make me have a permanent aha moment with regards to the areas of language that kept eluding me.

So he told me that story. Over and over. At every session. For four or five years. Like he knew I could reproduce language really well, buy he knew I had some major gaps in what it was for.

Also, he kept telling me story after story of the moments that his other autistic patients figured out language.

None of it worked, mind you. But it didn’t stop him trying. I had no clue WTF was up with him.

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