Helen Keller describes herself as able to initially adapt after the illness leaves her blind and deaf. She at first developed a sign language with her mother, such as pantomiming slicing and buttering toast when she wanted bread and butter or pretending to work the freezer and shivering when she desired ice cream. She played with a young companion named Martha Washington, and Helen did what she could—even sometimes by kicking her nurse—in order to have her needs met.
However, as she grew older, and her crude ability to communicate became less suited to her developing brain, Helen became increasingly enraged at her inability to express herself. She started having "outbursts of passion" when she failed to make herself understood. These became more frequent, because she felt that "invisible hands" were holding her down. She began to have daily and even hourly meltdowns, which led her parents to seek out help. On the eve of Anne Sullivan's arrival, Helen writes that
Anger and bitterness had preyed upon me continually for weeks and a deep languor had succeeded this passionate struggle.
After Miss Sullivan's arrival and Helen's acquisition of a far more sophisticated sign language, she became much happier, describing her teacher's arrival as marked in her own mind by
the immeasurable contrasts between the two lives which it connects.
Helen Keller lost both her hearing and sight after contracting an unknown illness, possibly scarlet fever or meningitis, at the age of nineteen months. This event occurred prior to the developmental age at which children are able to clearly form memories or fully express themselves, but nonetheless, the confusion at suddenly losing both senses was undoubtedly traumatizing.
She spent several years of childhood able to communicate with others only through crudely invented sign language, and an encounter with Anne Sullivan at age six changed Helen's life. Anne taught Helen to communicate by spelling words onto the palm of her hand and became Helen's teacher, then governess, then adult companion over the course of their forty-nine-year relationship.
Helen learned not only to successfully live with disabilities but to clearly communicate with others through spelling, signing, reading lips (with her hands), and even speaking. While her attitude towards being blind and deaf was initially one of confusion and bewilderment, over time she simply accepted the condition, though frequent, frustrated outbursts were common to her childhood. Through education, hard work, life experience, and cultivating relationships, Helen adopted an attitude of joy and gratitude, inspiring many people through her speeches, writings, and activism.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/herrmann-keller.html
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