WW, your post just sent my thoughts back to this book I read years and years ago; prolly somewhere in the '60's. Can't remember the title or author for the life of me, but I believe it was an autobiography. The guy had gone blind as a child; he was one of the first people who gave me the idea that it can matter how you say things: he wrote that he met a store clerk and could tell right away that she considered him as "a person who is blind", and said that when he was referred to as "a blind person", the word blind sort of set up a fence around the word person.
Anyway--what reminded me was that, after he had completed all the schooling that was available to him, the rehab. people sent him to work in a facility that sounded like it was emotionally the equivalent of a button factory. It was a sheltered workshop for the handicapped; the work consisted solely of some menial task, such as counting and filling boxes. He said that after his short learning period that he was soon totalling 2 and 3 times what his co-workers were completing (and they got mad at him for doing that), and soon decided that he would have to somehow get out in the world and find something that was even a little bit satisfying.