Maybe they have thought about it before, but not giving it a lot of thoughts in different way. For instance, to some people, deafness is often thought of as just a disability. For culturally Deaf people, Deafness is not really something that certain people who see negativity in just because they (deaf people) accept it as a culture that helps them establish deafness as their true identity. I must admit, that my ambivalence on Deaf pride still remains although I strongly admire the beauty of sign language and still do.
I can say that sign language is awesomee!
My personal experiences as a deaf person will be explained to show a real perspective in Deaf world. The evidence to that is I was born deaf and had a cochlear implant at the age of 15. Sign language is a huge importance in Deaf world.
First, my hearing was profoundly lost at birth and the cause of my deafness was believed to be from my mother’s illness. I don’t really know how deep my hearing loss is and I don’t really give a darn about it. I imagine that must suck for me. But it didn’t bother me a lot when I think about it because I have been deaf for all of my whole life. When I was a little child, my hearing aids did not help me much as I thought they would do for the other deaf children who use hearing aids. Like, hearing aids only help the other children who can hear a little. I couldn’t hear really well like they did.
By the age of 15 or so, I had a cochlear implant surgery during my freshman year of high school so I could hear anything good with my cochlear implant but not hear excellently as hearing people would normally do. Before ever getting a cochlear implant, I grew up not hearing a lot of things such as a telephone ringing, a water faucet running, water flushing from a toilet, etc. With my cochlear implant, anything can be only heard but on different level from what people can hear. Funny, I don’t know if it’s a good thing that I happen to hear the noise of my urine down in a toilet bowl all the time.
Then again, it is imagined that in hearing people’s view, not hearing anything every day is like having a sense of the world in cold, dead silence. Like, anything cannot be truly seen without hearing. I’ve been so used to being deaf for a long time, so that silence never bothered me. My meaning of silence is different to what people think. As a deaf person, silence is like people not doing anything. Motionless. When I first learned sign language as my “spoken” language, sign language now became like a visual noise to me. For example if I were taken to a party where there are no people that use sign language, I would be terribly bored because things in the party seem to be quiet for me because people don’t sign. In deaf people’s view, seeing none of the use of sign language anywhere is like….having a sense of the world in scary, breathless silence.
In brief, these things are the parts of my experiences from Deaf world that I am living in. I was born fully deaf and so I don’t hear. My ear was implanted with a hearing device so I can hear. Sign language is my only “spoken” language. My experiences should show the perspective of what it is like to be in a deaf person’s shoe. I don’t like to reveal much of my life but I do this to show that deaf people do not make victims out of themselves. They are capable of doing anything except hearing.
*Just to note: Sign language in the video is British and my language is not. :o)
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