When a blackout hits the city, a blind man can give you some excellent advice.

When I was getting my disability my forensic psychiatrist told me that if he had not seen my Federal records, he would have sworn, as a professional, that I could not have done the things I was on record as doing.

I pointed out to him that the records were only part of it, a lot of it had not been declassified yet. I did not add that much of it never would be.

The point here is not me but you.

I am your blind man in a blackout.

I didn’t know I was handicapped. But all my life I have had to really develop abilities and observations to make up for what I couldn’t do, just as a blind man develops skills that seem almost superhuman, but are actually just concentrating hard on developing and using his other senses.

I have only known this since I was judged disabled, so my observations about THAT are recent.

The result is that I am almost unbelievably bad on a lot of things, but what I am good on, I am REALLY good at.

But it’s not all good. All my life people have been seen me do complicated things, and then lose their tempers when I couldn’t do simple things, like remembering. All through my childhood and into middle age, I had people roaring at me.

But it occurs to me that this has another side to it. You have seen me lose my temper here and apologize for it. Only today did I realize that that tendency is exactly the same one that caused people to lose their tempers with me.

You see, a normal person, if there is such a thing, loses his temper if a person functioning at a high level like me forgets something for the fourth time, and causes enormous inconvenience.

On the other hand, I have the same impatience with a lot of things that seem obvious to me but are really special Insights and skills that I developed to make up for my disabilities.

To understand this, think of following a blind man in a blackout. Compared to him you would be a bumbling fool. It is quite conceivable that he would lose his temper: “For God’s sake, man, do you have to knock every damned thing over?”

This gives me an intolerance of the lack of insight of other people, but the insight is the kind I would not have if I had not HAD to develop my abilities in the areas where I presume to give YOU advice.

I think this insight can be useful to anybody. My case is not unique, it is just a more extreme case of what everybody faces. You have strengths and weaknesses that are not at my level of actual clinical disability, but they are there.

Once again the reason I notice this is because it is so extreme in my case. But because of this I can give you some good advice.

You have disabilities you wish other people would understand better. But you have therefore developed strengths in other areas to make up for it.

The result is that you get a lot of pointless bullying when you screw up AGAIN. But another side of this is that you don’t do a lot of pointless bullying, as I do, when someone is in one of your strong areas and seems like a damned fool to you.

Most important, though, is the part of that bullying that you get from YOU.

I spent most of my life kicking MYSELF for forgetting something AGAIN. All of the vicious and agonizing treatment I received from others unfairly was less than what Old Bob did to Old Bob.

A German philosopher once said that if we criticized others the way we go after ourselves we would be classified as sadists.

Give others a break.

The best practice for this is to start by giving YOURSELF a break.