My Supports

I feel very fortunate because I have a lot of supports in my life. I have a wonderful husband, a terrific family, great friends and colleagues, a beautiful home, and an outstanding supervisor at a job that I love. The people in my life, especially my husband, have been there to celebrate the successes, work through the difficulties, and  support me when times get hard. My home is my sanctuary, and it is the place where I feel the safest, most creative, and most authentic. My supervisor and my job allow me to stretch myself and experience the most amazing things in the early childhood field. If I lost all of these supports it would be extremely difficult for me, especially if I lost everything and everyone all at once! If one or two of these supports were gone, the other supports would help me through, and I would survive. If I lost everything all at once it would be horrible, but somehow I would create another support system and go on.

The imagined challenge that I chose is becoming blind. I believe that all of the support factors that I have in my life would remain, they would just be altered a bit. I would also need to find additional supports such as: an Occupational Therapist to teach me how to negotiate my daily needs, public transportation because I would no longer be able to drive, and The Blind Center to learn how to read Braille. If I were blind and these supports went away I would not only be devastated, I would also be restricted in what I could do. Depending on how long I had these supports in my life before they disappeared I might not know how to do very basic things such as get food from the grocery store or go to work. Having a challenge, such as blindness, can make the loss of a support system even more dire than losing it as a person without a special need.