Share Your World (July 22, 2024)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I haven’t touched this blog in over a week, but thankfully have been doing okay. Today, I’m joining Share Your World. Here goes.

1. When you retire (or when you retired) do you have a picture of a small cottage with a white picket fence outside in a quiet village or something similar?
I honestly wasn’t fully sure at first what Di meant with this question. Do I have a picture? No. I have just one physical picture in my home and that one is of myself. Oh wait, she meant whether we envision ourselves living in a small cottage blah blah. Well, I for one don’t. I’m not technically retired, in that I’m not of retirement age and, since I never worked, I still consider that age (which by the time I reach it is probably mid-70s) the cut-off point for retirement. I don’t honestly envision myself ever living in a small cottage. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ll live in a care home forever.

2. What do you associate with school dinners (apart from school of course)?
I envision another post in the making, as I can talk up a storm about school lunches. We didn’t get a cooked meal at my schools. Well, I did a few times when I’d be having after-school activities. I remember one such meal, a dish called “hete bliksem” in Dutch, which is basically a stew of mashed potatoes, apples and bacon. I detested it!

3. Can you play a musical instrument?
No, not at all. I took lessons learning to play keyboards at the training center for the blind when I was 19, but really didn’t get beyond the absolute basics. I have forgotten all of it since. Like I’ve also probably shared before, I took a few guitar lessons when at summer camp in Russia in 2000, but it took me the whole first lesson to figure out what the instructor, who spoke only English and Russian, meant by the “strings”.

4. What made you smile today?
My being able to teach one of the student staff here about care profiles and him appreciating my “lesson”. Care profiles are the care packages and associated budget each client in long-term care is allocated. I really loved perseverating on a topic I know a lot about without it personally affecting me at that very moment (because the student staff isn’t the one making decisions about my care).

Another thing that made me smile today is being able to describe the above image, which Di used for the optional gratitude section, directly from the web through my screen reader. I think I somewhat agree with the sentiment expressed in the quote too. At least, in my case, life may not always get better, but I do get to experience good days at every age.

How I Was Disciplined As a Child

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today’s topic for Throwback Thursday is “rules and discipline”. I am going to try to keep this post as non-triggering as possible, but if you endured childhood abuse, you might want to skip this post. Then again, maybe what I endured wasn’t abuse at all? Well, in that case actual survivors might want to skip it because it might come across as invalidating.

My parents rarely set clear rules when I was a child or teen. I can’t remember having curfews and, even at ten-years-old, I was allowed to stay awake in my room for as long as I wanted provided I didn’t wake anybody else.

In this sense, none of the provided questions in Maggie’s original post made much sense. I mean, I was often sent to my room as punishment, but I cannot remember what for. I also was never told how long to stay in my room, so I usually stayed for about an hour then slowly re-emerged.

My parents, both of them, also used corporal punishment. However, I get a feeling that they hit me more out of a sense of powerlessness than out of a righteous wish to set me straight. Unfortunately, corporal punishment didn’t stop when I got older. In fact, the last time I was hit, was when my parents more or less kicked me out of the house when I was nineteen. And then I don’t include the time my mother tried to slap away my hand from my hair to prevent me twirling it when I was 23 but I slapped her hand away.

My parents, like I said, didn’t have clear-cut rules, but they did have expectations about socially appropriate behavior. They had their own words for ridiculing me when I “misbehaved”.

The positive side of there not being many clear rules, was that my parents encouraged me to do things most other teens, and certainly disabled teens, would not have been allowed to. I was allowed on a four-week-long summer camp to Russia at age fourteen, being the youngest of the Dutch participants and the only one with a disability (the program officially catered towards the visually impaired). Then again, when I struggled socially in Russia and for this reason wasn’t allowed back the next year, my parents, especially my father, completely guilt-tripped me rather than showing me support.

I was mostly a rule-follower, insofar as there were rules at all. However, as a teen, I became secretive. I actually had my father drive me to a meeting of people with mental illness when I was seventeen, while I’d led him to believe it was a disability meeting (because one of the people there was in a wheelchair). I’m pretty sure he knew, but he never confronted me.

I don’t have children of my own, so I cannot say whether my upbringing influenced the way I discipline them. However, I did find I got easily triggered when I got the impression my sister and brother-in-law used corporal punishment on my older niece (this was before the younger one was born). Thankfully, they were able to reassure me that they didn’t.

Travel: My Most Enjoyable Vacation #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Welcome to day 20 in the #AtoZChallenge. I am feeling a bit frustrated with myself at the moment and as a result not as inspired to write. I hope this mood will lift while I’m in the process of writing this post. Today’s topic is travel. I was inspired to write about this by a nightmare I had last night, which was about a summer camp I attended in Russia in 2000. I don’t want to revisit that right now, so will instead be writing about my most enjoyable vacation.

This was, incidentally, also a summer camp. I attended the International Computer Camp for blind and visually impaired students in England in 2002. Because of my negative experiences with the summer camp in Russia, I had my reservations about going to this camp. Of course, this time I wouldn’t be the only blind person, but I still worried that I wouldn’t fit in.

The computer camp was held at a college for the blind in Loughborough, a town in the East Midlands. For this reason, we also took a trip to the West Midlands to see the Black Country museum or that’s what I remember it being called. This was something about the industrialization of England, but I wasn’t able to follow it much.

For most days, we had two workshops we could attend on computers and technology. I at the time had just discovered the Internet and was excited to learn what cool tech there was out there. I attended some workshops on word processing, but also on music and audio. I was also lucky enough to be on the editorial staff for the camp newspaper. I loved this and this was probably one reason I later began an online diary.

The staff worked at various disability agencies in their respective countries. One person I remember well worked at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. He helped visually impaired students find their way through college. He taught a workshop on studying abroad, though it was more of a general survival skills for blind students workshop. This was perhaps the best experience I had there. It helped me realize that I wasn’t the only blind person out there trying to follow her dreams.

This was also the general message I took home from the camp: I am not alone. I met lots of blind and visually impaired young people from across Europe who were facing the same issues I was.

I returned to the international computer camp in 2003, this time in Switzerland. I liked that a little less, possibly because the Dutch staff who attended this time were a bit more pushy about my independence. I still enjoyed it though.