SoCS: Let Them Eat Cake

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The initial idea would have been to write about world peace. Honestly, who doesn’t want that?

If I could say anything really stirring on that goal I would have said it a long time ago, not waiting for a blogging prompt to say my piece.

Then there’s my love of cake. I love a big, delicious piece of cake, but then something else popped into my mind.

In fact, it’s always in there somewhere, so it just pushed a lot of other stuff in there out of the way and made itself at home, front and center.

When I was in the eighth grade I started writing a diary. Well truthfully, I called it a log, not wanting to call it a diary because I felt the word was becoming a cliche of sorts for young girls.

I wanted somewhere to write down my thoughts, somewhere with a name as different as I felt.

Silly of me. It was a diary.

🙂

From there, the idea sprung up in my mind, that I would write my autobiography.

What did a fourteen-year-old have to put into an autobiography anyway?

Well, I had just been through a year or more of illness, medications, missed school, and surgeries. I wanted to call it The Year and a Half From Hell.

This was back in 1998 and just barely was I using a computer at all.

I started writing it and I did this in braille, using the old, heavy-duty Perkins Brailler.

I soon had pages and pages of braille, a towering pile of pages filled with row after row of raised dots, telling my story, but only I could read it, with maybe the exception of my brother or maybe my mother.

Then, just as suddenly as the idea came to me, it faded. I ran out of steam, but the dream never left my mind entirely.

I didn’t know where to go from there.

Now that I have this blog, I wonder if my long harboured dream of writing, what I now call my memoir, if that is less necessary.

I now have a place where I can write, in a broken up manner, when I feel inspired.

The problem is that I didn’t know how to downsize something so integral to my life, into a book.

I didn’t know what to say and what to leave out.

Also, I have decided to scrap Year and a Half From Hell, in favour of a title that takes me back to that cliche question.

Piece of Cake:
It’s a phrase meaning a task that’s thought to be simple or easy to accomplish. No problem at all.

Of course that year I spent in hospital and attached to dialysis machines was anything but simple or easy, but I would have no idea as that fourteen-year-old girl, just how much harder the following years would be after the idea for a memoir first occurred to me.

I think it sums up the sort of sense of humour I possess. I am not overly funny in any real ha ha sense of the word.

🙂

I am more dry, ironic, witty sense of humour girl.

Both titles felt authentic to me, even if one is a highly repeated, widely overused cliche from way back.

I like it and, besides, it makes me think of that sweet sweet piece of cake I so often deny myself.

I would have used it as reward for all that hell I’d been through, and have done at times, but all in moderation.

Besides, those two things don’t go together for someone who was put on steroid medication from age twelve onward.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, I am just as sweet as any cake.

🙂

Plus, I don’t like pie, so Easy As Pie was never a possible title for any autobiography or memoir of mine.

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That was my offering for this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday:

http://lindaghill.com/2015/04/17/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-april-1815/

I was sorry to hear that this weekly blogging prompt almost came to a halt, so soon after I came across it.

Would have been a real shame, but I would have understood if the blogger herself, in charge of SoCS, if she needed the break.

Thanks for keeping it going. It has come to mean something to my blogging schedule and to myself.

I may even take a stab at the Wednesday prompt next.

Note:
If you read the title of this post and expected me to write about Marie-Antoinette, sorry to disappoint. Perhaps I will work it into a future post on this subject, but for now…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake

As for that pesky world peace question, I’m open to a discussion, if anybody has any ideas or suggestions.

Making the World Accessible: The 75% Problem

Another Memoir Monday and another edition of

The Redefining Disability Awareness Challenge.

This week and next are both about challenge, as the title of this blog series says.

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Q: What are the biggest challenges that you face in regard to disability?

A: This week’s question I choose to base mostly around a YouTube video I came across last week.

I may have already addressed this topic in a previous post, but when it comes to today’s question, there really is no other answer I can go with.

I could write and write about this subject, for endless words upon words, but the following video speaks for itself:

Making the World Accessible: TEDxBeaconStreet talk with Dave Power, Perkins CEO, on YouTube

The Perkins CEO speaks of a statistic that I hear, more or less accurately, and often I am brought down by the futility of it.

I don’t want to seem like I am pitting us against them, us visually impaired who want to work, up against the big bad rest of the world that stands in our way.

It’s the same sort of us against them that seems to be going on between feminists and everyone else/men or whatever group you want to go by these days.

Placing blame is not the answer. Playing the victim is not what we should be shooting for. Finding some way to work together is my dream.

The above video says that for visually impaired young people and adults wanting to find jobs, the biggest obstacle is not technology, but it’s the rest of the world.

I can’t say I disagree with this, therein lies the challenge, because I know there are things we can all do to improve such an overwhelmingly high statistic.

The challenge, for me, lies in finding ways to show my skills and talents to the world and having them give me the chance to prove them.

I fear the judgement and the criticisms I will inevitably face. How long will it take for the world to catch up?

Technology is growing by leaps and bounds. Two hundred years ago it was barely conceivable for someone born visually impaired or blind to even get an education.

Dave Power is President and CEO of the school that started it all in North America, that taught Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller.

Two hundred years later and through a school like Perkins or through a neighbourhood school, like the one I attended, education is a right that is denied to nobody.

Now it’s what comes once school has been completed that’s the issue.

What did we go to school for? To learn social skills. To learn how to read and write. But what comes next?

The realities of adulthood came up on me like a rising tide. I could not hold it back, but paying bills, filing taxes, making a contribution…

For any visually impaired person who feels like they can’t fit in and that there’s no place for them in the working world…I know how it feels.

I don’t want to make employers nervous. How many sighted applicants would be placed before me in line for any job I might apply for?

What safety concerns would an employer have when considering hiring someone who can not see?

I wish for an open dialogue with the employers of the world. If only they could get to know me and see just how responsible I am.

If only they knew how amazing technology is these days.

When I go over all the jobs in the world that someone without sight simply couldn’t do, I despair that there is nothing out there for me.

When I think again I correct my thinking and, once again, I want to show the world just how capable I am. It makes me want to prove myself all the more.

The stress of this and the fear and worry that I will never find meaningful work sometimes challenges me so much that I want to give up.

But that’s just not me. Life is full of challenges. I’ve been facing those challenges all my life.

Am I up for the challenge?

Is the rest of the world?

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Perkins President and CEO: Dave Power/About

About TEDxBeaconStreet

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What do you think of the 75% statistic I refer to in this post? What do you think can or should be done to improve it?

Next week’s challenge question ties into this weeks’ and is as follows:

What do you think are the biggest challenges that your family members face in regard to disability?