After I left a soul-crushing college experience to spend two even more soul-crushing years sitting at my parents’ all the time, I concluded that I desperately needed better independence training.
My research into training options for the blind turned up so little useful data that I ultimately decided to test the least-commitment option, then re-evaluate my progress/options after one month of that.
In the downtime during all of this, I frequently found myself imagining scenarios in which I just went back in time to do everything right without having to clean up the present mess. The inadequacies I found in this training pushed these fantasies further from “abuse knowledge of the future” and more toward “fix past me, take school seriously, and acknowledge that social resources are worth cultivating”; consequently, when it came time to evaluate my options, my answer to the question “Why not do the timetravel thing, except without the stock market cheats?” went from “I can’t!” to “Well, I still have student loans from last time and it’d take a while...”
So I compared and contrasted the most reasonable options, without regard for how I initially felt about them, and put more effort than usual into asking people for the details of each path (except for the “just go home and continue as usual” path, which I included for completeness).
I determined that, based on my needs, I’m better off doing college right, and trying to find a sighted minion while there to put me through some of the tests that a blind-specific training facility would take several months to get to. It’d just be more efficient in general: I could learn things and build up a more real-world network than the sorts of insular communities in blindness organizations, and I can trust the culture at some colleges to suit me better than the culture at blindness facilities, and assuming I can find a reliable minion, I can push myself at my own pace rather than waste loads of time on the huge chunks of the curriculum I mastered when I was 10. And the available courses would be more diverse and suited to my interests; where I’ve spent the last month, my options are “work for the IRS”, “assistive Technology instructor”, “Desktop Support Technician”, and “Microsoft Office Systems”; the other program I was looking at sounds like it’s basically the evaluation month, only longer and hopefully tougher.
Having said all that, and pretty much decided that returning to school is the best option, my DSB agent reminded me of something important that I overlooked: this leaves 5 months in which I’m right back to sitting at home, waiting for the fall term to start, with no guarantee that I’ll be out of my parents’ house in that time (I’ve supposedly been about to move out every three months since summer 2012). I think I’m talking my parents into using one of their upgrades to get me an iPhone (iPhones apparently give blind people superpowers), and we’re working on using this back-to-school thing to defer as many student loan payments as possible. This does not, however, give me much in the way of ideas on how to keep the next 5 months from being comparable to the previous 24. (No, I’m not fond of the idea of using my parents/sister as training minions, though I haven’t rejected the idea entirely.)
I appear to have rambled anyway. I could definitely use tips on how to achieve more brevity.
Summary (because I tend to ramble otherwise):
After I left a soul-crushing college experience to spend two even more soul-crushing years sitting at my parents’ all the time, I concluded that I desperately needed better independence training.
My research into training options for the blind turned up so little useful data that I ultimately decided to test the least-commitment option, then re-evaluate my progress/options after one month of that.
In the downtime during all of this, I frequently found myself imagining scenarios in which I just went back in time to do everything right without having to clean up the present mess. The inadequacies I found in this training pushed these fantasies further from “abuse knowledge of the future” and more toward “fix past me, take school seriously, and acknowledge that social resources are worth cultivating”; consequently, when it came time to evaluate my options, my answer to the question “Why not do the timetravel thing, except without the stock market cheats?” went from “I can’t!” to “Well, I still have student loans from last time and it’d take a while...”
So I compared and contrasted the most reasonable options, without regard for how I initially felt about them, and put more effort than usual into asking people for the details of each path (except for the “just go home and continue as usual” path, which I included for completeness).
I determined that, based on my needs, I’m better off doing college right, and trying to find a sighted minion while there to put me through some of the tests that a blind-specific training facility would take several months to get to. It’d just be more efficient in general: I could learn things and build up a more real-world network than the sorts of insular communities in blindness organizations, and I can trust the culture at some colleges to suit me better than the culture at blindness facilities, and assuming I can find a reliable minion, I can push myself at my own pace rather than waste loads of time on the huge chunks of the curriculum I mastered when I was 10. And the available courses would be more diverse and suited to my interests; where I’ve spent the last month, my options are “work for the IRS”, “assistive Technology instructor”, “Desktop Support Technician”, and “Microsoft Office Systems”; the other program I was looking at sounds like it’s basically the evaluation month, only longer and hopefully tougher.
Having said all that, and pretty much decided that returning to school is the best option, my DSB agent reminded me of something important that I overlooked: this leaves 5 months in which I’m right back to sitting at home, waiting for the fall term to start, with no guarantee that I’ll be out of my parents’ house in that time (I’ve supposedly been about to move out every three months since summer 2012). I think I’m talking my parents into using one of their upgrades to get me an iPhone (iPhones apparently give blind people superpowers), and we’re working on using this back-to-school thing to defer as many student loan payments as possible. This does not, however, give me much in the way of ideas on how to keep the next 5 months from being comparable to the previous 24. (No, I’m not fond of the idea of using my parents/sister as training minions, though I haven’t rejected the idea entirely.)
I appear to have rambled anyway. I could definitely use tips on how to achieve more brevity.