Somewhat Silent

Do you feel that more of your missed communications are a result of you not understanding, or the other person not understanding you?

By “missed communications” I mean where the end result is a complete miss, not just “please repeat that”.

I’ve found that I verify things to death most of the time, whereas hearing people don’t verify things, and tend to just assume that they’ve understood what I’m saying.

“Sometimes I forget that you’re deaf.” people say. Or maybe they usually forget it, as it becomes incidental and retreats to the back of their minds.

Sometimes I forget that I’m deaf, too. Jacked into my computer with the headphones playing music the way I’ve always heard it. Feeling my bare feet slap against the linoleum in a way that logically must make a sound, but that is silent. Dishes that clash against each other and clang on frequencies that I’m impervious to.

It’s not a song that repeats endlessly inside my head “I’m deaf deaf deaf deaf deaf deaf deaf deaf deaf” constantly as I move about life. It’s something that I only bump into. It manifests itself in annoyances and occasional un-chosen isolation. In people being nervous to meet me, and in notebooks full of written-things that might have otherwise been spoken. It manifests itself in my flipping past shows that are not closed captioned–the same way that I flip past shows that are in Spanish or Chinese. They’re just not in a language that I understand. It manifests itself in silent doorbells that send the dogs into barking fits, and intercoms that I can’t use. It manifests itself in a lonely feeling that I get sometimes when I see a group of people signing, and know that I’m not a part of that culture.

People think that ‘disability’ is all about the lack of the ability, that the situation and the situation alone is enough to invoke a horror, a different-ness, a constant repetitive knowledge, an entire burden of consistent can-not/do-not/am-not that that cannot be forgotten or ignored.

But it’s not. Has never been. It’s merely a situation that manifests itself in fleeting ways when worlds collide. I think about it more on the level of being an immigrant–I only notice when there’s a language barrier that’s not coming down so easily as I’m used to.

The funny thing about my deafness is how it profoundly shaped my social life in terms of who I befriended: namely males.

It all began in 1st grade, my first all-girl slumber party. The girls were playing a game where you had to whisper a story in each others ears and pass it down the line - this was my first realization that I cannot, for the life of me, hear whispers. Dumbstruck, I chose to sit on the sidelines, and would do so for many years.

As we all grew older, the gender-divide developed as girls tended to be more into chatting/gossiping, while boys stuck with more physical activities such as games/sports. Chatting was impossible for me, since I had to struggle so hard to hear female voices, so playing tagball on the playground with the boys was much more suiting to my enjoyment. If I ever talked to a boy, I had virtually no difficulty in understanding their somewhat deeper/slower voices.

Then as we all grew into adolescent years, I found that I could no longer just play along with the boys - they were starting to view me not as another buddy, but as a GIRL; the invites to play became rarer and rarer. God knows what was running thru their preteen minds. So, let’s just say I had to modify my behavior a little to keep the invites coming. I began flirting with them, taking cues from Seventeen magazine, and wearing make-up - deciding to weld my female status as a PR tool. This technique worked wonders - all day long, boys came knocking, asking if I wanted to walk to 7-11 for a slurpee or go for a bike ride to the park. As a result, I endured quite the reputation among the females - they began to eye me warily with jealousy - and the whispers, that I tried so hard to hear in the beginning, became about me.

In high school, I was still mainly running with the boys, but now the game was different. They expected a little more than just walking around the block together. I had no desire to ‘make-out’ or go to Homecoming, and consequently turned them all down. This mystified everyone, and so now it was the BOYS who whispered (’tease’, ‘lesbo’, you get the picture). Feeling isolated, I finally gave in to a boyfriend Junior year, simply to stave off the loneliness and rumors.

To this day, I’ve always had only one or two close female friends - and about 20 male friends (whose girlfriends/wives are highly suspicious with our strictly platonic friendships; they view me as the ‘Angelina’ even though I have never given them reason to worry). I’m happy with the friends I have, but wonder how many female friendships I might have cultivated over the years if it had not been for my deafness.

Your voice is nasal Your m’s and n’s aren’t nasal enough. You lisp on the S’s Your Z’s aren’t long enough. Your tongue sticks out when you say L’s. You’re talking from up here again instead of down here Say it again. Say it again. Say it the way I’m saying it now–see this little infestimal movement that I’m making inside of my mouth? You need to make that movement when you say that letter. What movement are you making inside your mouth when you make that sound? It’s all wrong.

Over and over again. Over the years. I’d master one sound, and then it would be rolled into a word, and then we’d find words that I couldn’t make the sound roll into the adjacent sound properly, and I’d repeat them over and over and over again. Into a microphone, into a bag, into a balloon, into a bullhorn, poking my cheeks, feeling my throat, pressing in on my stomach.

Your voice is nasal. Your voice is nasal. Your voice is nasal. Your voice is nasal. nasal nasal nasal. No one can understand you.

So I’d speak less nasally, then I’d be too un-nasal. Then I’d up the nasality, and I’d be too nasal, and I could only seem to find that sweet-spot of perfect nose-mouth-chest synchronosity one out of ten attempts.

I started whispering and talking faster and faster, less comprehesible. Less intelligible. Less time talking, less time thinking, less time breathing inbetween words. Get ‘em all out, all out, and who care if someone understands them anyway? No one can understand me anyway. Why should I waste the time to speak “clearly”? What a f*ing joke.

I hated speech therapy because it was goal oriented on a goal that I could not meet. And as such, it was a goal that I didn’t want to meet I can work on improvement, but it was never portrayed to me in that way. I was mainstreamed, so my speech classes were mainstreamed speech classes–classes for the kids that had a lisp or a stutter, or a slight adhesion of the tongue to the inside of the mouth. Things that would be corrected, and release them into the successful status of “graduated”.

And every year I was left behind, not realizing that I wasn’t considered a great failure of the system, but one of the biggest successes. Just one that would never fully graduate. Ever.

Not even her memory belongs to her. The facts of her childhood jog and shift, are worn down like bits of sea glass, the real memories supplanted by stories she has been told, for a deaf girl’s reality is easily manipulated by the parcelers of information.

p. 133, “Train Go Sorry” by Leah Hager Cohen

I do not overhear. I did not pick up information accidentally or absorb it through my skin the way that hearing children did, and do not do this as an adult. The things that I know, I’ve actively sought out or have had parceled out by another person.

Often, I wouldn’t know when we were going somewhere- and I’d rush about confused to prepare for a trip that I’d only been informed of moments before- when everyone around me had known for days but hadn’t thought to actively tell me.

I wouldn’t know what other children were saying about me behind my back–because my interpreter wouldn’t see fit to inform me–or would feel the need to protect me from the things that were said. I’d only find out when one of my friends from a lower grade would tell me what they had overheard many times, and they’d tell it to me in the form of a goodbye. “I can’t hang out with you anymore, Sara.” they’d say. “But why?” I’d ask, and I’d be informed that I was resistant to change the things that I had no idea I should change. Like the fact that I’d hum sometimes- having forgotten that the feeling made a sound.

Often, a friend wouldn’t show up to school. And I’d think that they were home sick for the day. Then weeks would pass, and I’d ask, only to find that they had moved- and the entire class knew, seemingly through osmosis.

I once found out that a boyfriend had been cheating on me–speaking to his lover on the phone while I was in the room. Knowing that I couldn’t hear him. Knowing I wouldn’t overhear any rumors around the town. Maybe even knowing that he could safely hide another women in his apartment and that I wouldn’t hear her shuffling around or leaving behind me as I was slightly occupied. I don’t know. I wasn’t told.

Contrasting, when I go to the inSight Cinema open-captioned showings and am surrounded by Deaf people, if I don’t actively avert my eyes, I ‘overhear’ so many things as my eyes capture bits of visual sound, converting it to words that my lipreading brain fills in blanks and turns into sentences which turn into stories overheard.

One of the things that I sacrifice by living within the hearing community as opposed to the Deaf community is an independent awareness of the human world around me. I know what I am told, and what I actively seek out. But I miss the casual osmosis of human interaction. An osmosis that people take for granted, often resulting in me yelling angrily “HOW COULD I HAVE KNOWN? NOBODY EVER TOLD ME.”