company—had been looking for someone to play the role and saw me perform it in our high school’s performance of the show, which they came to scout. (Throughout the years, I had participated in “Deaf Drama” as an extracurricular school activity.) The company offered me the role without even auditioning. However, my mother made me turn it down because she thought that it would place too big of a burden on my school schedule. But she agreed to let me be Marlee Matlin’s understudy.
ME AND MATT AT MY SENIOR PROM
When the show ran that summer, Marlee was in the middle of callbacks for the movie for the lead role of Sarah and was gone quite a bit, so I got to perform several times. Back then I did it just for fun. However, I can see now how acting on stage before hundreds of people in the role of a deaf character was a step toward later being on stage before thousands of people representing deafness for real.
From the outside, my life was good; I had a fun job, a great boyfriend, and tons of friends, and I was performing—but on the inside, it was altogether different. Camp had begun my journey toward self-acceptance, but by being with Matt all the time, working at the Colonial, living with my hearing family, and still taking the hearing classes at school, I remained that hearing girl at heart, while my struggles continued to grow.
At Matt’s graduation party at his parents’ home, he was busy entertaining and couldn’t be with me very much, and I felt uncomfortable in the crowd. The same thing occurred at his grandmother’s Thanksgiving dinner: I felt so out of place at that table. Even working at the Colonial—something that I had enjoyed immensely—became more difficult for me to handle. Yes, one-on-one my lipreading was good, but the Colonial was a busy place; usually there were too many conversations happening at once. And just because I could easily talk to a single individual does not mean that people would take the time to talk to me; and when they did, it was usually to give me instructions, not make social talk. That is a big difference. Feeling increasingly left out of the social scene and more and more isolated, having Matt around was my saving grace.
When it came time to choose a college, I went where my deaf friends were going: the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), which is part of the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and is located in Upstate New York. NTID attracted deaf students like me who came from hearing families, had been mainstreamed in public school, and were “oral.”
My other option, Gallaudet University, which is located in Washington, DC, had offered me early acceptance beginning January of that year, but I turned it down, wanting to finish high school with my friends and also wanting to have that time with Matt. In addition, because of my limited interactions with deaf people and my misconception that deaf people who don’t speak are not as smart as deaf people who do, I felt that Gallaudet, which tended to attract deaf people who signed and didn’t speak, would not be academically challenging. No one had ever explained to me that the deaf kids who don’t speak, don’t do so because they weren’t exposed to any language whatsoever until they were toddlers—neither sign language nor a spoken language—and that affects their ability to learn. I didn’t know that they were no less smart than the deaf kids who spoke, like me.
This was often the case with deaf children who had hearing parents (which is 90% of all deaf children). Things today are different, but in the past, a child’s deafness often wasn’t discovered until the child was diagnosed with a language delay at two or three years old. By that time, the child has gone years without any language whatsoever, which can be detrimental to the child’s ability to learn.
In contrast, deaf kids born to deaf parents are usually exposed to ASL from birth, just like hearing kids are exposed to a spoken language, and they are academically on par with hearing kids or deaf kids like me who were exposed to language early on.
At the time, I didn’t even realize that Gallaudet was known as the Harvard of deaf universities! At that time, Gallaudet primarily attracted deaf students who had been exposed to sign language from birth, who, unlike me, came from deaf families, and who were part of the Deaf community and Deaf Culture. Instead of going to public school, these students were often sent by their parents to residential schools for the deaf, or stay-away schools. Living in the dorms with the other deaf students and being with deaf teachers and other deaf adults, they grew up immersed in Deaf Culture and ASL.
When I arrived at NTID, it felt like Camp Mark Seven to the nth degree. I was in heaven—an entire university filled with deaf students for me to meet, hang out with, and learn from. I was back in a communication-accessible environment twenty-four hours a day; I had arrived. There were deaf dorms, professors, staff, counselors, RAs, organizations, parties, sororities, fraternities—2,000 deaf people, just like me, who brought their “being deaf” with them to explore and cultivate. I had found my niche: people to whom I could relate on all levels, people who had pride in themselves and their culture, and people whose culture was so important to them that they were full-force with it, wanting to support others on their journeys as well.
Even though most of us at NTID hadn’t grown up in the Deaf community, the bond and the understanding that we all shared allowed the Deaf Culture, which we had longed for, to be easily cultivated and expressed. We inhaled it. Discovering that deafness wasn’t our enemy nurtured our sense of self-acceptance and belonging. Classes and workshops on deaf-related issues and support from deaf professors helped us find our place within the Deaf community. In that milieu, I continued to evaluate myself.
My struggles with trying to fit in but feeling different in the hearing community had fueled my lifelong desire to be the best—not the best in relation to others, but the best that I could be. Now I believed that I had the best—the best communication, friends, teachers—everything. I was driven, aware that I was changing, but I knew that the change wasn’t complete yet. I quickly became a member of the NTID Student Council. I was being propelled onward—the pull toward accepting being deaf was increasing by multitudes.
Yet, I was also in a major identity crisis, feeling angry and rebellious at my family and Matt, whom I felt didn’t understand what it was like to be deaf or how important being deaf was to me. To be fair, even back in high school, I never let Matt understand, believing that if I really let go and fully embraced that I was deaf—if I went all the way and had more deaf friends and signed rather than spoke—he wouldn’t be comfortable with that part of me and wouldn’t want to spend his life dealing with my issues, my causes, and my world. I just focused on the present. I was on the crest of a wave, feeling stronger than ever before, yet still not accepting of those whom I felt didn’t understand me and had let me down.
When I first arrived at NTID, I was carried away with being away from home. Immersed in this newfound world, it was easy to let Matt slip from my mind. I didn’t write him a single letter, and on Labor Day weekend, after having to practically force myself to go home, I saw him even though I didn’t want to, and he felt my distance. Then, I played hard back at school until Thanksgiving break, when I came home and wanted to patch things up between us. But when he picked me up and we got into his car, I could tell that he wasn’t himself. He was angry at me for “disappearing for months,” and told me he had started dating another girl.
“It’s different. We have our song,” he said. “I really enjoy listening to the radio with her, listening to music . . .”
His words made me sick to my stomach, but I didn’t say a word.
Looking back, I know that Matt didn’t mean to hurt me with his comments, yet it shook me to the core because it was a sobering reminder to me that we were different. He was hearing and had the right to be hearing and enjoy those things—he deserved that. He didn’t have to be dragged into my Deaf World and my deaf issues. He had a right to his life, as much
