TToT: Wave Form Audio – Drop and Drag, #10Thankful #RoaldDahl100

“Don’t analyze. Don’t analyze. Don’t go that way. Don’t live that way. That would paralyze your evolution.”

Analyze – The Cranberries

I love autumn and am glad when the days cool off from oppressive summer heat waves. Lots of waves. Waves at the beach this past summer. Waves of fear that I am making wrong choices or not making choices out of fear to begin with. There are audio waves too, I’m learning. Letting that wash over me.

September has arrived and I feel a lot of pressure. I feel tense a lot. I feel the turmoil going on everywhere around me, in this giant and complex world. I try to find my place in it. I try to not allow things I have no control over to drive me to even more stress and distraction. Such anxieties are common, universal, and I can get through and keep moving forward.

And so, here I am, I will try not to analyze everything and I am more thankful than ever.

I am thankful for the perfect title for an essay I’m working on.

It was provided by one of my brother’s friends on Facebook.

I know. I know. I need to finish writing the entire essay, but I get inspiration and a direction to my essays if I have the right title to begin with.

This one is just so perfect, so fitting, and then I took his idea and I ran with it.

I am thankful I have started to learn a new song on my violin. It’s a special one, something I’m learning for someone special who’s on the way, before we know it.

This required I start playing a new string, the D string. Up until now I was only playing on half of my strings, E and A, but now I need to learn to move my fingers over just a little more and to hold my bow on a slightly differing angle.

I am thankful to have such a smart niece, one who seems wiser than her nearly six years on this planet and who knows how and when to ask the right questions.

Okay, so she may have done that thing where you answer a question with another question, but when you have something important to ask, I say go for it.

I am thankful that we got the second episode of our podcast all done and recorded.

All we need to do now is a little bit of editing. We were aiming to keep Ketchup On Pancakes at sixty minutes, which episode one just magically seemed to be. This one’s looking more like seventy minutes, but we think we can cut it down a bit more before we release it.

We just need to research more about podcast platforms and how it all works.

I’m thankful, especially, that we got one segment in particular completed.

We decided to read one of the short stories I’d previously written on my blog, as more of a dramatic reading, and you don’t realize how difficult that is until you keep messing up words.

It took about eight or nine takes to get through the small story with the least amount of mistakes throughout. We were both reading from our braille devices and you can actually hear our fingers moving across the dots as they pop up, as we move through the lines. We decided we like that sound in the background.

I am thankful for awareness for pain.

It’s something I don’t talk a lot about on my blog. The stigma and judgments are out there and sometimes I feel like people don’t want to keep hearing about it.

September is Pain Awareness Month and I do believe that anyone living with pain should not have to hide away. I know that must sound contradictory, but I do believe fear of judgment is often what it boils down to.

I am thankful and grateful because I actually have a pretty wonderful support system, where others do not. I do want to bring this silent suffering out into the open.

I have found some things that help and that work to make things bearable, but I thought it worth mentioning at this time.

I am thankful for even more awareness of a different kind.

Whether it’s the awareness of feminist issues or disability awareness, this week I was reminded a lot and heard from those speaking out and up.

Rick Hansen Interview – CBC’s The National

Again, people fight it. They become angry and defensive, on both sides, but if you’ve never experienced something yourself, I would hope there would be compassion and a little understanding for something someone else may have gone through to make them feel they need to say something or do something.

There are some who say they don’t want to identify themselves as feminist. That probably means, once again, they haven’t had many problems with something, be that a woman who has lived a somewhat privileged life and has had no reason to feel the need to fight for something.

I don’t care what you call it. I call it feminism and people freak out. I use the word equality and it’s pointed out that nobody has total equality with everything. I just speak from my unique experiences. I’ve been lucky, but I’ve also felt extremely limited in the world. I am taking steps toward empowerment, but it’s not as easy as it might seem.

I am thankful for a relatively stress free visit to a school for the blind in a city not too far from me.

I did not go there for my education. I went there this week to check out some computer equipment, to see about getting some new technology.

A lot of that is now becoming more accessible with the introduction of Apple products. They don’t require, for the first time, extra software or programs to make things square. It’s all built in.

But there’s still the braille readers and they can be thousands of dollars. Here in Canada, in Ontario where I live, there is a governmental program which helps out with the cost.

I am thankful my nephew made it through his first full week of school.

We ask him if he likes school, if his teacher is nice, and we get mostly “yes” to our questions.

He’s probably wondering why we are so curious. Things are more likely to come out at more random moments, like the rocks from the playground he kept bringing home in his pockets, or the little girls who are likely a few years older than him and who help him with his backpack when it’s time to get off of the bus.

It’s both exciting and anxiety inducing. He’s getting so big. All the children in my life are.

I am thankful for the connection made possible through WhatsApp.

It’s how my friend living over in Ireland sends family back here in Canada photos and videos of her one-year-old daughter.

I am honoured to be added to such an exclusive group. She includes descriptions of the pictures when she sends them so I know what’s going on in them.

Oh, and, Happy Birthday Mr. Dahl, who would’ve turned 100 this week.

My grandfather Roald Dahl, the magician

This article written by his granddaughter in The Guardian made me miss my own grandfather, who never published a book, but who was a magical storyteller himself.

“I will not pretend I wasn’t petrified. I was. But mixed in with the awful fear was a glorious feeling of excitement. Most of the really exciting things we do in our lives scare us to death. They wouldn’t be exciting if they didn’t.” So says the boy hero of Danny, the champion of the world.

Travelling With the Speed of Sight

We’ve all heard of travel at the speed of light, but how fast is travel at the speed of sight?

I’ve been away from posting on Monday for

The Redefining Disability Awareness Challenge,

but I return, with a special edition of

THE CHALLENGE.

This one is bringing awareness through an interview I did the other day on something called Purpose Talk Radio and Blog Talk Internet Radio.

Meet the Blind

Travelling With the Speed of Sight.

It was my first Internet radio show interview. I think I will stick to writing and my blog, but just as I feel an invisible push to do that, Cindy Freeman does her online radio show and this month she has been focusing on the subject of blindness for the month of October.

I am more than just that title, but I know it is necessary to grab people’s attention in the first place.

We spoke about my blindness, my writing, blogging, and my love of travel.

She asked me what I feel my purpose to be. It’s writing. That’s all I know for sure. It’s writing. It’s always going to be.

October 15th was

White Cane Safety Day

in the US.

This is just when you’d want to meet the blind, but when I think of titles and what they say, as far as my Memoir Monday posts and disability awareness, I get a little stuck on titles like, “Meet the Blind”. I can’t help feel that I am more than “the blind”. But just how much more? What more?

So she met me and I got experience that I wouldn’t otherwise have had. I answered her questions to the best of my ability.

I needed a break from disability awareness, but then I realize I can’t get away from it, no matter how hard I try.

As for RDAC, I guess I got a little burnt out on the Q&A format, but I aim to complete all 50 or so questions by the end of 2015.

Diagnosis – Piece of Cake!

It’s a little over a year now since the launch of:

The Redefining Disability Awareness Challenge,

on Rose’s blog.

I would find it not long after and make the decision to join in here.

One year later and another summer has arrived. I have been skipping some Memoir Monday posts, a summer break of sorts, but I am nowhere near out of things to say on the subject of disability awareness.

***

Q: At what age were you or your loved ones diagnosed?

A: This question, I thought, would be better answered by those who remember what it was like at the time. I was only an infant after all.

🙂

I asked my parents to relay the events of those early days. This is what they said:

Diagnosis for you was kind of gradual. First, I thought things weren’t quite right when you were between 2-3 months because you didn’t follow with your eyes like most kids. The family doctor didn’t notice anything until I pointed it out at the end of your 3 month checkup.

It took a week to be sent to an eye doctor and he realized it was serious but didn’t diagnose anything and sent us to a Pediatric Ophthalmologist.

Dr Orton said that he thought it was Leber’s and said that you were visually impaired but he never said the word blind. We waited until you were 8 months old before they put you under anesthetic and gave us a positive diagnosis.

It was always upsetting when we were dealing with doctors, but as a young baby there were few differences.

CPRI

was involved because of a suggestion from other parents of a blind child by the time you were 8 months old and therefore your development was never really delayed. They were very helpful with lots of suggestions.

So first we just didn’t really know a lot of details and were a little in the dark. It was kind of a wait and see.

With your brother, we asked Dr. Orton about him on one of your visits and he wouldn’t even look into his eyes (2 weeks of age). He said that he had to be older before he could tell us. We knew he was blind by our own experience by the time he was 6-8 weeks old. I don’t know if it is better to learn gradually or be told everything up front.

***

These things couldn’t have been easy on them, but the life I’ve had since being diagnosed is proof of how well they adjusted and thrived as our parents. I owe them everything.

This is where I say that, up until now, I have used the RDAC to write about blindness as a disability I have lived with, through the good and the bad times, but there would be more diagnosed, and this year marks twenty years since the second round of diagnosis would begin.

Going forward, I will be starting a new topic on this blog: Piece of Cake.

This will focus on the kidney disease, that would be added to my diagnosed syndrome.

I have wanted to write a memoir for many years about this time. I had the name picked out from that first day I sat at my brailler and started writing.

In the months and years to come, I will be looking back on these turbulent events, through the power of words.

Next week:

How has your life changed as a result of that diagnosis?

Redefining Disability – Facebook

Come check things out over there.