Re: Any tips for dealing with lonelyness?
While I'm very in to creativity, solo exploration and contemplation myself, and therefore would not disagree with the last two posts, I'm afraid my point in post 12 was a little harsher than that.
The plane fact is, that despite all people's talk about acceptance and diversity and what not, with any disability, your always dealing with a perception of difference. Most of society views you as an intrinsically different sort of human being. With blindness (and possibly with deafness, facial diplegia and maybe some other conditions as well), you can intensify that perception ten fold.
This isn't to say that it is always like that in every situation, or that there aren't skills you can learn as detailed in this topic, just that for the majority of the time, you will find yourself put into the "weird blind person", box, and there won't be a lot you can do about it, since it's not ultimately you who has the key to that box.
It is frustrating as hell, and you will run into it again and again, however myself, I am coming to realise that ultimately since you cannot change other people, you are best off trying to change yourself.
for the last three years, I have had no RL friends other than the one I am married to. My previous friends live at a distance and our contact is infrequent, and efforts to find anything resembling people of similar interest and intellect where we are have failed entirely.
High school is pretty crappy, but try having your wife diagnosed with cancer, and then spending two hours in the supposed cancer support drop in centre only for have literally no one to speak to you.
Then, when you actually raise this to the cancer support charity, to get invited to an under forties support group they're setting up, only to be kicked out on a technicality after the first meeting with no alternative, (so much for supporting people with cancer).
This is why I say just get used to loneliness. As a blind person you will be on your own resources far more than other people, you won't be able to make casual friends or simply fit into social groups, neither will friendship mean as much to others as it does to you, since they always have the opportunity being accepted elsewhere.
Work on cultivating inner resources, coping with emotional problems alone, get tough, and when you find those few accepting places or that one special person, do anything you can to grab the opportunity with both hands, even if it means extensive travel or a lot of work.
sorry if people find this overly pessimistic, but honestly, if I'd realised that there was actually nothing wrong with me, and everything wrong with the way the world works a lot sooner, I'd have been far better putting my time into trying to learn to cope , than into castigating myself.
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