Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was bewildered and afraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me-a potential to live, you might call it-which I didn’t see, and they made me want to fight it out with blindness. The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If I hadn’t been able to do that, I would have collapsed and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life 1. When I say belief in myself I’m not talking about simply the kind of self-confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is part of it. But ! mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite its imperfections, a real, positive person; that somewhere in the sweeping, intricate pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit.