Maybe I would have joined the circus....

This blog post--

http://chroniclesoffibro.blogspot.com/2012/04/if-i-knew-then.html

--started me thinking.



I don't want to whine, but....(notice the ellipses?) I started wondering what my life would have been like if I'd gotten the right education.  What if I'd had piano lessons as a young child like Evgeny Kissin?  It would be pretty vain to think that I could have been another Mr. Kissin, but perhaps I could have at least had a career in music.

Maybe I could have studied proofreading.  Right now I could be working from home even though I'm sick (I mean in general--I haven't suddenly taken a turn for the worse or anything).  I was really good at mathematics.  Maybe I could have gotten some accommodations and started some kind of a career in something.

If only people had even partly focused on my strengths instead of only paying attention to my weaknesses.



And then, what if we'd known forty years ago what we know now about autism? 

I could have been given special education to try to fit in with the crowd.  Maybe I would have even reached eighteen years of age with some of my self-esteem intact.

I might have been put on social security at eighteen.  High school dropout, no driver's license, no job, no friends--the government might have believed it if they'd seen my school records.  And maybe I'd have been on Medicaid and I would have been able to get the treatment for CVID.  Maybe I'd have been one of the lucky ones who responds to treatment by being healthy enough to have a life.

And what about all of the personal relationships that might have survived if people knew what was the matter with me?  What if I'd been employed at something--that would have changed many people's opinion for the better (including mine at times).  Not to mention the effect just having a name for what was the matter with me would have had on me.



I wonder what my life would have been like if I'd been born forty years later.



I guess most of us don't wonder things like....gee, I wonder what it would have been like if I'd been born in Afghanistan and married to some old geezer when I was twelve, or, gee, I wonder what it would have been like to have been born into some dirt-poor family in North Korea.  Nobody ever asks, why, God, why me, why do I have a roof over my head and a piano sitting in my dining room? :)  Or, why am I able to walk to the kitchen and the bathroom all by myself?)

Maybe I should be wondering what my life would have been like if I'd been born forty years earlier.  I might never have known what was the matter with me.  Without the internet, I wouldn't even have been able to get my meds from overseas.  No blog, and the piano would have been a lot harder to learn without the 'net.  Although nobody would have expected me to work outside the home if I'd been eighteen in 1943.

And I suppose that's enough Sunday-evening-cloudy-weather musing.  It's about time I got up and got moving.