Hello everyone.
I think we might be taking a break from blogging for a while. A lot of things are coming up, including the potential integration of some of our main people with me, Maria. We’ve just gotten out of high school, and we need time to figure out how to put what happened there into words, and to do some other things related to that situation so that we can at least try to make sure that what we went through doesn’t happen to anyone else who goes to school through that district. We’re also looking at the possibility of going to the center for the blind that is closest to our current location so we can learn basic living skills and hopefully be living in a place of our own before too long. The last time we were over there, we loved it and even got to be ourselves somewhat, which was wonderful in its own right. I can’t say the same about high school, or our schooling experience as a whole, for that matter, but that story can wait. Right now we need to meet the two goals we set for ourselves a couple of posts ago, and in order to meet those we first have to find a place where we will be safe to express what we feel in ways that are natural to us, find stability within our inner world and ourselves, and gain independence in our outside/physical life.
Gaining independence requires us to learn basic things like cooking, cleaning, and shopping, among others. We’ve known, though refused to admit for ages, that not knowing how to do these things, despite being perfectly capable of doing them, was, and is, a big reason why our confidence in ourselves is as low as it is. Part of that may have been our own fault, at least when we were younger, because we, as a young child, had no desire to interact with some textures, but as we grew older we began to notice that even when we showed a desire to learn these things, the people who tried to teach us to do them had no patients with us as we tried to learn them in ways that worked for us. Our biological family were the worst at that, and in some cases the environment some of them were trying to work in was not exactly ideal in terms of organization and cleanliness. We can wash dishes now that we’ve moved to a place where those things aren’t an issue, but now our next task is convincing the person we’re living with that we can pick our own clothes out, remember to brush our teeth and hair, and ask for things when we need them. Thankfully she, unlike others we’ve known in the past 18 years, isn’t nearly as impatient with us as other people have been. Yes, she can be a bit of a nag sometimes, but honestly, when compared to our previous living situation, that tendency isn’t anything we can’t handle. In some cases we’re glad for the reminders, though they do lead to a decrease in the attempts we make to do some things independently of being reminded, which is something we have to keep an eye on.
Unfortunately, none of the places where we’ve lived for a long period of time have been accepting of our multiplicity, which is where the goal of developing strong senses of ourselves as individuals came from. Our school, with the exception of two peers, either never knew of that part of our life, or never accepted it as anything more than a behavior, and then, reluctantly, and to our dismay, as a mental illness toward the end of our time there. Our home situation was not that much different, and the place where we live now hasn’t made it easy to be comfortable being ourselves, but we are determined to create a life for ourselves where we won’t have to hide, when we become more able to do things on our own. When we have established our physical and financial foundations, we plan to find a place in the advocacy world, if we haven’t done so already, so that we can be sure that we aren’t the only ones who benefit from our freedom. As of now, we don’t know what path we want to follow, or perhaps create, but we know we want to do for others what was never done for us as far as speaking up about things that need to be talked about. If we are to reclaim our lives, we need to help others do the same, or, better yet, help others get to situations where they won’t lose aspects of themselves and their worlds in the first place.
Finally, there remains the task of gaining stability within ourselves and our inner world. While this may be helped in large part by a change in our environment, the bigger piece to achieving that stability will be in my accepting of some difficult truths that as of now, I cannot put into words. This is the primary reason why we, as a community, are taking a break from writing here. I need to focus on everything in my life at the moment, and since I seem to be the person of the community that everything on the inside ultimately points back to, I have a lot of things I need to reconcile with my sense of who I am and who the others living within me are. This task, along with making the arrangements necessary for us to get training for our independence, must be my main focus for a while if I am to get anything useful accomplished over the next few months. It’s not that this blog hasn’t been useful, but rather that right now, I can’t find the words I need to have in order to write things that people will want to read, and I don’t want to produce poorly made content just to keep the place going.
When I can, though, I will be writing here again. Until then, thank you all for reading and responding to the things we’ve shared about ourselves and our life.