by the hand to get the person to come with her.  She knew quite a bit about what was going on, despite being unable to see or hear, due to her intelligence.

It was upsetting to Helen that she could not understand what people were saying.  Her family memories had made various stopgap efforts to communicate with her, but they were getting less and less adequate as she aged, and Helen was strong-willed.

I was strong, active, indifferent to consequences. I knew my own mind well enough and always had my own way, even if I had to fight tooth and nail for it. (Ch. 2)

As Helen gets older, she says “the desire to express myself grew” (Ch. 3).  She does not have enough signs.  She lives too far from the school for the blind and deaf.  Her parents decide to hire her a teacher, and they find Anne Sullivan.  She will allow Helen to have a voice, and unlike the meaning of language.

Communication is the key to our humanity.  It is a fundamental desire of human nature.  Helen was young, but she had a desire to be heard, and an innate intelligence and strong will.  It was this willpower that made her into the strong woman she would become.  She was different from other people, and could not talk with her voice or see with her eyes like everyone else could, but she found a different way to see the world and make herself heard.  Helen Keller always knew she would never give up.

After the illness at nineteen months that left her blind and deaf, Keller writes, she forgot that her life had ever been anything other than one of darkness and silence. However, while this state came to seem normal to her, she also had moments of realizing she was different from other people. For example, she recognized that somehow other people communicated with their mouths, not their hands. She was so curious about this that she would touch people's lips while they talked to each other, but she did not comprehend how they could communicate this way. She would move her lips in imitation and make wild gestures, hoping to be understood. When she could not communicate the same way as others did, she would throw tantrums, kicking and screaming.

It's interesting that Helen located her difference not in being blind or deaf, but in being unable to communicate. Her deepest frustrations as she turned six and seven were not her disabilities but the way they blocked her communication channels. Her mind was developing but had no outlet, until Miss Sullivan came.

In her autobiography, Helen Keller wrote that she did not remember when she came to the realization that she "was different from other people."  She did realize this fact before Anne Sullivan, her teacher, came to stay when Helen was almost seven-years-old.

Helen used hand signs to communicate with her family and others in the household.  Even though she was blind and deaf, she was an incredibly intelligent and observant little girl.  At some point, young Helen "noticed that [her] mother and [her] friends did not use signs as [she] did when they wanted anything done, but talked with their mouths."  As a little girl, Helen was fascinated with people communicating with their months.  At times, she "stood between two persons who were conversing and touched their lips."  Despite her fascination, Helen found it frustrating that she was not able to understand exactly what was happening.  She tried moving her own lips to communicate, but nothing happened.  It made her extremely angry that she could not participate in this form of communication.