Never Give Up: Helen Keller

This post is part of the "Never Give Up Day" Event by the Depression Support Subcommunity

For this “Never Give Up Day”, we are going to tell the story of someone that embodies this ideal to a maximum degree: Helen Keller.

Her attaintments overcoming huge challenges might seem out of reach and utterly unachievable for us, common human beings.

However, I think the life of some extraordinary people, like her, might inspire us, instilling the feeling and the vision of what is possible.

And serve as a lighthouse in the distance, as an aspiration that we might move towards on our own terms, within our own reality, and at the scale of our own resources.

I hope you find her story motivating and inspiring, and feel the emotions shared over decades by millions of people, that someone facing seemingly unsurmountable challenges, could overcome them, and even become widely renowned as a human rights activist, an influential intellectual, and a great writer.

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.” Norman Vincent Peale

Helen Keller

“The greatest woman of our age.” - Winston Churchill

“Helen Keller is fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare, and the rest of the immortals. . . .
She will be as famous a thousand years from now as she is today.” - Mark Twain

Helen Keller was born in 1880, in Alabama, USA. Her father was editor of the local newspaper; her mother was an educated young woman.

When Helen Keller was 19 months old, she was afflicted by an unknown illness, possibly scarlet fever or meningitis, which left her deaf and blind. She also became mute due to her deafness.

Helen was extremely intelligent and tried to understand her surroundings through touch, smell, and taste. However, she began to realize that her family members spoke to one another with their mouths instead of using signs as she did.

Feeling their moving lips, she flew into rages when she was unable to join in the conversations. By the age of six, Keller later wrote in her autobiography, “the need of some means of communication became so urgent that these outbursts occurred daily, sometimes hourly.”

A most amazing event occurred in 1886, when Helen traveled with their parents to Washington, to ask for help from no other than the inventor of the telephone and the phonograph Alexander Graham Bell. Being the owner of the phone monopoly in the US, he was one of the richest men in the world

But Bell was also a philanthropist (like a Bill Gates of the late XIX century). devoted to helping the deaf. Helen wrote in his biography "My Life" (which she dedicated to him) that as soon as she met him she "loved him at once."

Bell contacted the Perkins School for the Blind, the leading institution on this subject, and asked its director to send the best possible teacher to live with Helen and teach her full-time.

The next year, 20-year-old Anne Sullivan came to Helen's home. In Helen's words "The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrast between the two lives which it connects."

However, Helen had developed a tough, rebellious character, and the first weeks of the relationship. Helen hit, pinched and kicked her teacher and knocked out one of her teeth. Sullivan finally decided they both had to move and live in a small cottage next to Helen's house, and have their classes there. Through patience and firm consistency, she finally won the child’s heart and trust, a necessary step before Keller's education could proceed.

Sullivan started by fingerspelling the names of familiar objects into Helen’s hands.

She began her task of teaching Helen by manually signing into the child's hand. Anne had brought a doll that the children at Perkins had made for her to take to Helen. By spelling "d-o-l-l" into the child's hand, she hoped to teach her to connect objects with letters.

Helen quickly learned to form the letters correctly and in the correct order, but did not know she was spelling a word, or even that words existed. In the days that followed, she learned to spell a great many more words in this uncomprehending way.

Anne incorporated Helen’s favorite activities and her love of the natural world into the lessons. Helen enjoyed this “finger play,” but she didn't understand until Sullivan spelled “w-a-t-e-r” while pumping water over her hand. Keller later wrote:

"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. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! …Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life."

In the days that followed, “I did nothing but explore with my hands and learn the name of every object that I touched; and the more I handled things and learned their names and uses, the more joyous and confident grew my sense of kinship with the rest of the world.”

A year later, in 1888, Sullivan brought Helen to the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. For the first time, Helen developed an extensive and meaningful social life: “I joined the little blind children in their work and play, and talked continually. I was delighted to find that nearly all of my new friends could spell with their fingers. Oh, what happiness! To talk freely with other children! To feel at home in the great world!”

Since then, she came to spend every winter at Perkins.

There, Helen studied French, arithmetic, geography and other subjects. She especially enjoyed the tactile museum’s collection of bird and animal specimens.

Throughout her life, Keller devoted her energies to humanitarian pursuits, advocating for economic justice and the rights of women and of people with disabilities. She asserted her right “to feel at home in the great world” and through her eloquence and tireless activism, she fought for the same right on behalf of all people.

She entered Radcliffe College at Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1900 and received a Bachelor of Arts degree cum laude in 1904, the first deaf and blind person to do so.

In 1903, her autobiography, "The Story of My Life", was published. This book has been translated into 50 languages and remains in print to this day. Millions of copies have been sold all over the world, inspiring millions of people.

She wrote several more books, all of which became bestsellers, in particular "Optimism" (1903).

Helen traveled to twenty-five different countries giving motivational speeches (through an interpreter) in favor of people with disabilities. She promoted women's right to vote, was a pacifist, and an ardent activist for social justice and the dignity and rights of the poor (this even brought her under the scrutiny of the FBI).

She also co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union with other American civil rights activists in 1920, against racial segregation, and other constitutional rights issues.

She had a very active life as writer, speaker and activist until 1961, when her health declined. She died peacefully in 1968.

"The Story of My Life", the main book by Helen Keller, ar Project Gutemberg:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2397

Some reflections by Helen Keller taken from her books and speeches:

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much”

"Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold."

"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened."

"When one door closes, another opens. But we often look so regretfully upon the closed door that we don’t see the one that has opened for us."