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What have I done?!What have I freaking done?!
I need to get the hell out of Dodge. Now.
Those fifteen minutes I committed to for coffee with him turned into three hours before I knew what had hit me.
My latte and his coffee went cold, and we didn't even take a single sip.
We just sat at that little corner table out of the way, passing his phone back and forth between us, and just… asked questions, talked, and got to know each other.
I don't think I've ever conversed with a hearing-person that wasn't a family member for so long and so openly in my life.
Carson doesn't know ASL other than a few signs here and there that he went to the lengths of learning for me —forme!— and I felt too shy to use sim-com around him, and so we made do with writing.
I'm positive that, with any other person, this would have meant there was no chance of having an actual conversation. Things would have turned awkward pretty fast, and then we would have gone our separate ways, but he didn't let this roadblock stump us.
He just sat there with me, typing away and having a conversation that, other than a few signs, a few words —from him— and a little bit of miming here and there, happened entirely on his phone screen, and he didn't seem to mind that in the least.
In my experience, most people in his shoes would have become frustrated in five minutes top.
Communication comes so easy to hearing-people… they can have a conversation without even looking at a person's face. They can say things fast while they look away and still have a nice chat. So, when they attempt to talk with someone that has a hearing loss, and everything has to be slowed down and carefully spelled out, and facial expressions and lips have to be read closely, and hands also have to be watched intently, they soon become irritated; or they lose interest in listening to what I have to say and/or in me learning whatever point they were trying to get across.
Speaking is normally such an effortless thing for hearing-people compared to us that it's just too much trouble for them to even try to meet us halfway sometimes.
I've been told horror stories throughout high school and even now at Gallaudet by fellow students. About how their own parents and siblings never learned ASL and how horrible they felt about what they perceived as a total rejection of who they were by the people who were supposed to love them exactly as they were. It was like they were not worth the effort of being really known through actual communication unless they were the ones that put in all the work to learn to sound out words and read lips.
And they would do that. They would do their damnedest to be good at speech therapy and really learn to talk, but it was never perfect enough. It was still difficult for their loved ones to understand them and to be understood by them because they could not rely on ASL to fill in the blanks and use sim-com as a way of making things easy both ways since their relatives refused to learn the language, and so their conversations were meager at best.
I've been lucky in the sense that I've never had to deal with this type of situation in a domestic setting other than during those first three years of my life.
My dad was deaf, and my mom had been willing to learn ASL to talk with him, and they had taught it to Jared, too. So, when I came along, they were actually the ones that taught me ASL and sim-com and all the stuff that made our family life so amazing, but when I got older and I went back to interacting with strangers, everything turned difficult and awkward and painful.
It wasn't as terrible as being unable to talk with my parents and brother would have been, but it still did make me shy away from hearing-people.
I don't want to ever be a burden to others, and for most of the people that I've met, even speaking two sentences to me is too cumbersome, so I never push them for conversation. This is why I made learning to read lips and body language into a kind of personal mission and the central focus of my academic career. I wanted to break the barrier. I tried to make things easier on myself and those around me, but I soon realized that what countless deaf and HOH friends had been telling me all along was true: it's never enough. You are never perfect enough for the world at large.
But what I just walked out on, at the restaurant just now with Carson… that was different.
I've never had someone outside of family who didn't know ASL and was willing to work this hard to be able to speak to me, to understand me, and be understood. I've never met someone that didn't give up after the first try and walked away, laying the blame squarely on my shoulders since I was the one with the hearing loss, and therefore it was not their problem that communication couldn't happen, but it was somehow my fault.
Most people typically make me feel bad about myself for even wanting to try and be a part of any conversation going around me.
And yet, Carson was so patient with me, so open about things, so accommodating…
He was so eager to learn even more signs from me in the hours we just spent together so that we could understand each other even better minute after minute.
Now he knows how to sign'Again,''Slower,''Repeat.'At first, I thought he was just being polite in asking how to use the signs in conversation. I soon realized he really meant to learn them, and it looked like he retained the know-how because he was applying it throughout our talk, and I can't put into words what that meant to me.
But still, I had to leave. I couldn't stay any longer. Things were turning dangerous to my sanity.Hewas turning dangerous to my sanity.
Then why do I feel like I made a mistake?
Why is it so difficult to take each and every step that's taking me away from the hotel, from the restaurant, from him?
I felt touched beyond belief by his actions. And it's kinda terrifying me a bit.
I'm not a person who trusts easily. I'm pretty closed-off, and I just don't know what I'm supposed to be doing right now.
Part of me wants to turn around and run back in there, go back to that table, stay there forever, and just keep talking to Carson.
