"Life is either a great adventure or nothing." - Helen Keller
Helen Adams Keller was an advocate for persons with disabilities, a lecturer, activist and author. She accomplished all of these feats, completely blind and deaf. Born in 1880 in Alabama, USA, she lived in a time when persons with disabilities had very few resources to turn to, and when they were mostly ignored. Read on to find out how Helen Keller beat all the odds to live a fulfilling life.
Around the tender age of nineteen months, Helen Keller lost both sight and hearing after a terrible illness. Until the age of 7 years old, she moved around almost animal-like, angry with everyone and everything, bumping into things or eating her meals like a dog. Nobody in her family could get her to behave or understand what was going on around her, and indeed, were at a loss. A governess, Anne Sullivan appeared on the scene at this time, and the story of how she managed to teach, tame and transfer knowledge to Helen Keller became fodder for a play, ‘The Miracle Worker’ which has since been adapted into Oscar winning movies as well.
Anne Sullivan brought a doll as a present on her first day at the Kellers. Her first task involved teaching the sightless Helen the word ‘doll’ by spelling it into her hand. Helen was of course incredibly frustrated, there was no way of communicating to her that each object or person had a unique word to describe them. When Anne tried to teach Helen the word ‘mug’, Helen actually broke the mug in annoyance, as she had no idea what was going on. When interviewed later on, she would explain that she was just following along, making gestures with her hands as taught, but with no clue as to why she was being forced to make such odd signs.
Helen’s breakthrough came when Anne was running cool water through her hands, and then it appeared to click. The word being spelt into her hand was ‘water’! In her own words: “I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!”
Anne Sullivan would become Helen’s life-long companion, while Helen would go on to become the first deaf-blind person to obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree. She even learnt to speak, and ‘hear’ using the Tadoma method, to read using Braille and to communicate with fingerspelling. She travelled to 25 countries, giving motivational speeches wherever she went about conditions for the deaf. Helen penned and published 12 books, advocated for women’s votes, pacifism, ending racism and more.
People often find the most inspiring aspect of Helen Keller’s life to be the fact that she accomplished so much despite being blind and deaf. I find that her achievements are impressive enough by themselves, even if she had not had any disability to speak of. May we all be inspired to live our best lives, no matter the circumstances.
