[Oabs] confidence, and summer reading questions; my delayed questions

[Lillie Pennington]

Hi everyone

 

I sent this yesterday, but don't think it went through. My original email is
pasted below. 

 

I know I was supposed to send my question out a few weeks ago, but as life
generally happens, I got distracted. Anyway, here I am, with a few questions
I'd been meaning/had been pondering asking for a while. 

 

1.       An issue we as blind persons generally face at some points in our
lives is confidence, whether gaining, maintaining, or losing it. When have
been points in your life that you have struggled with this? What are your
best pointers to get through it? What would you say to someone you were
advising/mentoring on this issue? And lastly, how as a student devision and
as rising leaders can we make it easier for those adjusting to blindness and
other students going through similar issues that we have once faced?

 

For me personally, I have struggled a grate deal with confidence, mainly in
late elementary and middle school. This was mainly because of some bad
experiences with some teachers I had in sixth grade. I'm not going to get
too much into the story here because most of you already know it and I
really do not want to look like I'm creating a sob story. In a nutshell, I
had a homeroom teacher who I had been lead to believe was a pretty good
person. Lets just say she wasn't very nice (to me at least) and she and I
would have bad encounters almost daily. It got to the point where I would
pretty much go home on the bus either crying or try to wall myself off as
completely as I could. I didn't believe in myself. I thought that although
it was unfair, there was nothing I could really do. I really didn't know
what self advocacy was, and if I did, I probably wouldn't have employed it. 

Although I've pretty much accepted that what happened in this situation was
mostly wrong, it still effects me, although to a lesser degree, nearly 5
years later. 

 

So, on how I learned in the future? My biggest suggestion, that I've given
to several others (and it seems to work) is at least at first fake it.
People are more likely to attack someone who is down than someone who at
least looks confident in their abilities. Adopt a posture that suggests you
are confident. At first you won't feel confident, but later on you will
start to. 

 

If I were advising someone else on this, I would give the same advice I gave
above and also to just pull through it (at some points, that's all you can
really do), along with talking to friends/whoever can help you. Also, self
advocacy or doing something about the situationis key here. 

 

I think we as a student devision need to keep in mind that not everyone is
at the same level as us confidence/independence/blindness skills/in general.
I think, especially as we grow to be a bigger group of people, we need to
keep this in mind, and maybe have these sorts of blindness discussions. 

Just a thought, but what do you all think of in a few years when we have
more people maybe having OABS doing a mentoring sort of thing with younger
blind/vi Ohioians?

 

 

2.       Summer reading. I know this is off topic, but I've been meaning to
ask most of you anyway. For my English class this year I have to read two
nonfiction books of at least 200 pages in length. The first book has to be
about a person. The second about a cause/group/something like that. 

I'm looking for suggestions outside of the blindness realm. Any good people,
causes/groups/topics, or books that any of you have read and think are good?

 

Looking forward to reading everyones responses.