Re: family/future. Need advice
To add:
There's no way you're getting out of this without talking to a lot of people.
IME, there's enough turnover among VR counselors that, if you have trouble getting one to be especially helpful, you need "only" hold out for a couple years and try a new one. However, this might vary from state to state, or with time, so I can't promise anything here.
The corollary is that you need to know what you're after, and that it's worth pursuing. Doctor-shopping is dumb if what you're shopping for will just make things worse, ne?
But this means phone-calls to your VR offices, phone-calls to college people, phone-calls to employers, if you take the NFB route you have to talk to your state's NFB president and the admin of the training center in question. In-person meetings with VR counselors and disability services and people in the registrar's office are also inevitable.
At some point in college, my Braillist noticed I was really, really bad at people, and set me up with the speech pathology department at the nearest university with a speech pathology department. The therapists in question were mostly students, with the actual PhDs occasionally showing up for evaluations or supervising, so if I got a therapist who was focused more on basics geared toward the "does not get idioms" end of the spectrum, next semester there'd be someone geared more toward my actual weaknesses (... sort of, anyway). These range from teaching autistic children the basics, to teaching adult professionals why they're failing at sales or whatever.
I almost feel like a socialization bootcamp is becoming increasingly worthwhile for millenials and gen Z in general, in the US at least. I feel like LCB actively encouraged this sort of thing without being as obnoxious about it as, say, welcome weekend at college (perpetual hiss!), but it's difficult to transfer that aspect because of how easy it is to get adapted to the particular context. Rallying enough courage to ask for directions or addresses in Ruston, OK. Coping with NFB National Convention? No, I could not do that. I spent half the convention in my room trying to make an accessible Dewprism. Coming home, I can better handle occasionally going places, but permanent neighbors and being in Random Encounter distance of family adds a layer of anxiety that getting dropped in the middle of nowhere, Indianapolis does not. (Euphamism, the Good Samaritans™ who were sufficiently aggressive as to warrant literally running away are less troublesome, because they're little more than a random bossfight, so to speak.).
A lot of people who go to NFB centers and are struck by how big an improvement they are over where they were have this failure mode where they do everything they can to not leave. A lot of LCB elumni live in Ruston, and I wouldn't be surprised if Littleton and Denver have a lot of CCB elums. I totally get why this happens. I could see myself falling into that trap with slight tweaks to my character sheet. (Side-note: if you're set on moving to the west coast, CCB might make the most sense for training, with California's Lighthouse programs being next on the list.)
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