Storytelling – A Multitude of Musings

Last night, I couldn’t sleep. I was looking for some link-up parties to join in and came across the Life This Week linky. In this week’s edition, host Denyse shares her memories of the year 2003. As this is my first time participating in the linky, I should really start my story from the beginning on, but for some reason, I can’t.

I may have shared this before, but in secondary school, I always had this superstition that life ran in circles. There’d be a year of struggle and crisis, a year of renewed hope and finally a year of disillusionment, after which I’d spiral back to struggle and crisis. The year 2003 was a year of disillusionment.

In 2003, I was sixteen. I turned seventeen at the end of June. I was in the tenth grade for the first half of the year and in the eleventh for the last half.

In the summer of 2002, I had barely moved up a year. My grades weren’t that good and I only moved up because I worked very hard the last few weeks of the year. I had been struggling with feeling like an outcast due to my blindness the entire 2001/2002 school year. That was to change by late 2002, or so I believed. My high school tutor promised me he’d help me feel better.

What he did was come up with a social skills assessment for blind students and have the teachers fill it out. That was no good for my self-esteem, as I showed considerable weaknesses. No-one knew at the time that I was also autistic, even though I suspected it.

The year 2003 was the year I started to learn about myself from a possibly autistic point of view. Even though I had started suspecting I was on the spectrum in mid-2002, I didn’t feel comfortable joining online support groups for it till 2003.

This was also the year I expanded my horizons where it came to using the Internet in general. I had gotten an Internet connection in May of 2002. By April of 2003, I started keeping an online diary on DiaryLand, which several years later morphed into my first WordPress blog.

In the summer of 2003, I attended the International Computer Camp for blind students in Switzerland. I had attended it the year before, when it was held in England, too. This year, I felt a bit disappointed in the end, because it didn’t provide me with the cathartic experience I’d felt the year before.

In 2003, I also explored fictional storytelling as a way of expressing myself. I was experiencing some significant selective mutism at the time, which I could circumvent by pretending I wasn’t talking about myself. This is how my “mirror image”, Kirsten, came to be. She is one of my main alters to this day.

Finally, this was the year I was first starting to explore future planning. Here in the Netherlands, students with disabilities attending mainstream education didn’t get any type of special transition planning at the time. I was expected to just get by and go to university straight out of high school in 2005. In 2003, I started to doubt this would be a success, but I didn’t voice my doubts yet. As it is, I didn’t actually make it clear that I wasn’t going to university right out of high school until April of 2005.

Where were you on the path of life in 2003?

I’m joining in with Share Your World – Revisited. It’s revisited because it’s now with a new host. I realize I’ve only participated in the original SYW once, so for me this isn’t a huge transition. For Sparks’ first week, she has a few really good questions to spark (pun intended) our creative thinking.

When you are old, what do you think children will ask you to tell stories about? If you are “old” (a term with different meanings for everyone); what stories do you tell your grandchildren?
I don’t have children and don’t ever intend on having any. I also don’t tend to gravitate towards children, so I don’t tell any outside kids any stories and probably never will. That being said, I love reading stories to my inner children. I don’t make them up myself though. I love free children’s books on Amazon Kindle. May post (or have my inner children post) some thoughts on some of them someday.

When did something start out badly for you but in the end, it was great?
My life. No, it isn’t necessairly great, but it’s better than it started out as. I was, after all, born prematurlely and had to be on the ventilator for six weeks. I’m now pretty content with life and above all, I’m here.

What do you think you are much better at than you actually are? Maybe this one’s kinda mean…thoughts?
English and writing. No, I’m not fishing for compliments. I used to write stories as a teen and thought I’d someday be a published writer. Then my husband told me my stories aren’t all that imaginative and he’s probably right. I did get one piece published in an anthology, but it was non-fiction.

As for English, my husband is able to take a test that guesses your level of German fluency that’s itself in English and scores at C1/C2 level (those are the two highest levels). I don’t speak German at all, but sometimes I think I could reach that level of English fluency. Well, I can’t.

What would be the worst thing to hear as you are going under anesthesia before surgery?
“I guess she makes for a good experimentation object.” Seriously though, I don’t know.

What did you appreciate or what made you smile this past week? Feel free to use a quote, a photo, a story, or even a combination.
Seeing my riding school horse Angie for the first time after summer break.