It was by luck that I was mainstreamed and immersed into an experimental method called the Look, See, Say method of teaching deaf children the English language. Therefore, I grew up familiar with the words and how they fit together to tell stories. I learned to read by memorizing shapes of whole words. I remember them showing us a big poster size flip chart with a picture of bear and a box simply outlining what the word shape is. They taught us the actual letters later on. I don’t know what other deaf children go through to learn how to read when they are immersed in the ASL lifestyle. I am sure it is a very different experience from what I had. I was immersed into the hearing world and I always knew there was something missing. I don’t remember the exact moment I realized it was sound, but after I understood there was a whole world that I was cut off from; that only made me determined to try to understand it through words.
I seized anything that looked like it would describe sounds in detail to try to imagine what it is like to hear. I would scour books for references to sound and savor each word. I would attack poems; desperately trying to ‘hear’ the words, the cadences, and the way the words feel in my mouth. I would comb the dictionaries and thesauruses for words about sound to read the definition and try to understand how it must feel in hearing people’s ears. I would cross reference between the thesaurus and the dictionary in my search for noisy words. I would discover the word click, look it up (a slight sharp sound), then I would go to whatever the book/poem used this word to describe the sound and I would feel for this sound. In this case, the lock clicked. I went to my door and felt the doorknob with all of my senses and listened with my touch for this mysterious click. A metallic tickle in my hand! This is a click! Excited, I would go to the thesaurus and search out ‘click’ to find bang, clack, etc. I chose clack because this is so similar to click. I look for clack in the dictionary (to make a quick sharp sound) and I saw an example: “The fork clacked on the dish.” Naturally, I went to the kitchen and listened with my touch for this clack. It vibrated my hand. So a click tickles and a clack vibrates.
After a while, just reading about sounds didn’t satisfy me. I had to share how I felt about my soundless but vibrating world. I am able to become more than just that deaf girl through my words; becoming someone that counts. When I convert what I think into words, my thoughts suddenly has relevancy in the dominantly hearing world. In real life I am unable to defend myself or to intermesh myself into conversations, but in my writing I can lay it all out for the world to see so that they may understand where I am coming from. Writing is the only way I, as a deaf woman, am able to share my experiences in a universal way.
