What a trip. Signing is truly the best gift I have ever received.
And it was also a huge, huge source of insecurity for a very long time.
The more deaf people I meet, the more I realize just how common of an experience this is, even among people we would expect it from the least. Influencers, celebrities, leaders… Truly, it is a rare phenomenon for a Deaf person to naturally feel comfortable with their language use from birth or a young age and to not even think about how they’re communicating. Actually, I think it’s impossible in a hearing world, although it certainly is possible in environments of community like family, the deaf community, signing spaces, schools for the deaf, and so on.
I still have my moments of insecurity today, moments where I feel like I’m rusty because I haven’t fully signed with a native signer for a while and it’s like I have to learn how to bike again – it’ll come back, yes, but I’ll find myself mentally stumbling for a bit, so afraid to fall, even if nobody really notices and just sees a kid riding a bike. I always will have these moments, like so many of us will. Signing is not naturally embedded everywhere we go, like speech is.
Everywhere we go, we so often search for information in other ways – the moving words on a train, street signs, squinting at the unhelpful monitor with zero updates at an airport while workers are speaking in their microphones or whatever, making important announcements you can’t understand… Holding your phone up to the guy who’s here to fix something for the voice recognition tool to tell you what he’s saying… Vague gestures from people and hoping you understood the directions or answers right… These people who keep claiming to know ASL but only painfully slowly spell out their name without even asking for yours, and you don’t even try because they wouldn’t be able to understand your speed anyway… Short conversations on a napkin with a pen that runs out of ink… Pointing at different foods or products and having to bounce your finger repeatedly and keep eyeballing the item like Spongebob to get the worker to finally scoop up that right thing… Watching people’s lips as they clearly ask you if you can read lips, and as you hesitate and say “kind of”, and proceed to stare at their mouth kind of intensely, of course it looks like they’re now speaking complete gibberish and you have to either nod, shake your head or scramble to find a way to accommodate…. The list goes on and on.
Yes, it’s all too familiar of an experience for many of you. And the truth is, even to be home with various communication channels, whether there are ways to communicate or not…
If you’re not able to have FULLY fluent, effortless conversations with others who share the same language [fluency] as you, you’re going to feel exhausted.
Even if you can carry conversations or speak or sign slowly. It’s still exhausting because it takes WORK to change yourself, your language, your personality for the other person to understand you on a constant basis. And SO many of us internalize this kind of code switching to the mainstream so muchh to the point that what should feel like a natural language to us feels unnatural. Or it may feel natural, but we feel insecure.
There are many different levels and spectrums to this and it’s not to speak about the people we interact with, not at all – in many instances, they’re trying their best and these people we’re thinking of are the people we love and care about the most. for us, it’s routine, it’s normal, it’s automatic to code-switch. we try to move our mouths a bit more to be understood by these hearing people even though Siri can’t even understand, we become fun, friendly people in efforts to create a bond. We put on a smile and even though it may be genuine in the moment, at the end of the day we just need to crash because that was so much work. It’s just a very complex experience and it’s what many of us know but don’t actually describe because it’s just normal to be straining for these tastes of knowledge, access, understanding, comfort.
To be here where I am took YEARS of rocky roads of struggling to feel like I was present, struggling to feel comfortable with my signed expression outside of the written word because I was either invisible or too seen for so long. So to be communicating in this way felt like MAGIC and a BLESSING… And also a bit of a curse because I wasn’t used to it and I knew it wasn’t aligning with who I actually was and how my mind was in the inside, you know? Today, my ASL finally matches what I feel on the inside, and it takes PRACTICE and COMMUNITY to pick up on the confidence, flow, harmony, music, magic, insight, depth, art, growth, evolution that ASL gives you.
So, yes, we gotta trust the process, count our blessings, and also lean into community because we need it more than ever. We need it to truly embrace ourselves and all of our potential and all of our dreams. If you think of all the successful deaf people that come to mind, what do they all have in common?
This is what each deaf person deserves, and those who want to sign with deaf people in their lives should be welcomed with open arms and open hearts (while being respectful of boundaries and generational traumas, of course). Yeah. I’ll end this here.
This is me celebrating my growth and this is me celebrating yours because we’re all growing right NOW. Remember that. Trust that.
Lots of love.
