Today is also Sunglasses Day. This is the basis for a tasteless joke that I don’t have to make now because you already have the punchline in your heads.

When I was in my 20s, one of my editor bosses confessed to the room once that his recurring nightmare was that he’d sit up in bed and find Helen Keller in his room trying to kill him. I can’t tell you how hard I laughed at the idea that this able-bodied guy with all five of his senses intact wouldn’t be able to outmaneuver a deaf and blind woman—especially one who had been dead for 25 years.

I’m pretty irreverent about Helen Keller. I fully acknowledge that I do not fully appreciate what she overcame—not because I’m a jerk but because I literally cannot conceive what it was like. Having managed to stay alive for five decades and change means that I have stumbled through dark rooms on occasion and can sort of imagine being blind. As I get older, I am certainly more familiar with what it’s like to be deaf. But my imagination founders when it comes to conjuring up the feeling of being both, of not knowing how to send or receive messages, of being utterly reliant on someone else for so many things—not getting hit by a car, finding a towel to dry your hands.

I mean, that’s why babies cry, right? Because they can’t just get up and grab a snack; and they can’t say “Hey, ma, get me some grub.” They use the only means they have to get their point across that Something Needs Doing. Imagine being six years old and the same level of powerless.

I’ve talked before about how I read a TON of biographies when I was growing up. When I found a person I was interested in, I would read multiple books about that person. So I did read multiple books about Helen Keller, and I learned a lot about her. She gets a bum rap these days in a lot of ways that are deserved and not deserved. Her family owned slaves before the Civil War. She was a Socialist, she co-founded the ACLU. She spouted some popular opinions of her time about eugenics. History only teaches about her childhood, which has led to society infantilizing other disabled adults. Blah blah. Only some of this has to do with the person she was and what she accomplished.

But she wasn’t actually my person of interest. Anne Sullivan was. I guess maybe we don’t like her now either because her writing reflects a casual racism by today’s standards, despite the fact that one of the first things this Massachusetts native did on meeting Helen Keller’s family in Alabama was argue with them about slavery. But what that woman accomplished is really difficult to overstate. She didn’t have a plush background—her parents were immigrants; Anne got trachoma and was basically blind from the age of 5; her mom died when she was 8; and when she was 10, her dad bailed on the family. Her younger sister went to live with an aunt, Anne and her brother went to live in the poorhouse which pretty much doubled as a nuthouse. Anne’s brother only lasted a few months before he died of TB. The poorhouse was not a nice place—in 1875 it was investigated for reports of not only sex abuse but also cannibalism. A guy on the investigator team ran a school for the blind, which Anne heard about and after five years, a bunch of failed eye operations, and a lot of begging, that investigator finally got her into the blind school.

Growing up like that, school was a lot more for her than just learning to read and write. She had to learn how to function in society and not like an animal in constant mortal danger. Again, I can’t really imagine what that must have been like, so I get a little glib. But lots of good came out of that school for her: She finally got some eye operations that helped her see a little better, she graduated valedictorian, and —maybe most notably—she was friends with another student who was blind and deaf and gave Anne experience with the manual alphabet.

After graduation, she was recommended to the Kellers, mostly to be a governess and keep Helen out of trouble. The family didn’t seem to expect much—they didn’t want to educate the kid; they just wanted to keep her from smashing up the furniture when she wanted a piece of cake. But once things clicked and the two sides connected, it was hard for them to keep up. Anne pushed and eventually got the family to send Helen to the Massachusetts school that Anne had graduated from. That ended badly when what appears to have been inadvertent plagiarism (forgiven even by the original author) by 11-year-old Helen blew up into a national incident.

Nonetheless, Helen and Anne stuck it out. Helen graduated from Radcliffe, became a writer and speaker, and lived a truly amazing life for someone for whom the original expectation was only to be a docile invalid. Anne hung in there for something like 50 years; she and Helen were still a team when Anne died—living a truly amazing life for someone whose dad ditched her in a loony bin at the age of 10.