Support

I pride myself on being pretty blunt. But I'm less good about addressing certain things. And on those topics, other people will occasionally write more bluntly than I dare to.

The life of a person with disabilities is not tragically unfulfilled because they have a disability. This is a more contentious issue within the disability rights community, which I won't get into unless prompted because it's sort of tangential. But suffice to say that many, many, many people with disabilities do not spend their time dreaming about how grand life would be if they were just "fixed."

That's what I used to tell my family when I was a kid. It's much, much better now.

I have been thinking about this for a bit over a year now, and I think that when I go to grad school, I will ask for support - and learn to use it. ASL, CART... I'm not sure what's out there, I'm not sure what's going to fit me, but when I go back to school, I'm going to find out and I'm going to try.

Do I need this? No, in one sense. I can work in the mainstream world just fine without any support. I lipread, I speak, I constantly make a thousand tiny unconscious adaptations to cope with being a non-hearing person in a hearing world. (Or as I like to think of it, "all my friends have hearing superpowers!") But on the other hand, what is it like to use those tools, those resources? What if you didn't make a thousand tiny adaptations - what if you made a few hundred less, and asked the world to try adapting to you for a bit?

It'll take a lot of work to learn how to access that (my ASL is awful), but... it would be a shame, I think, to shut off that part of the world as an uninformed decision. Maybe it won't work out for me, butt I should at least try. And I am curious what I'm missing, if anything. We shall see!