The words catch me off guard, and it takes me an extra second to process them.
“I’ve heard you voice, I know that you can.”
I sign back, “Sometimes,” and this is met with the weary expression of someone I realized, later, did not understand that this was not the “sometimes” of choice.
I will save another post for the camp I had the opportunity to work at this summer that prompted this request (it has been very exciting and I’m honestly a little sad that this is the last week). The camp itself is for deaf and hard of hearing students, who all have very different experiences of Deafhood: mainstreamed, deaf school, signer, voice, hearing aid user, cochlear implant user, no devices.
Obviously, it is difficult for me to understand any sort of voicing, as even with hearing aids (that i no longer wear most of the time), there are some delays in auditory processing, shipping, and handling. Specific kinds of repetition help best, but with some voices, no amount will help. Last year, after another hour of repeating back what sounded like gibberish and clicking buttons even when I couldn’t tell whether my ears or the machines were ringing, I recall my audiologist telling me that my speech comprehension had gone down. She recommended wearing my hearing aids more often and listening to people talk to me.
This was something that I really only did regularly during therapy sessions, or talking to my non-signing sister, or watching movies to which I really wanted to hear the accents and music (though when I referenced “mentally subtitling when I know what’s being said,” a friend pointed out to me, to paraphrase: “if you need to touch something to see it, you’re blind, and if you need captions to hear, then you’re deaf”).
I grew up with a complicated relationship to my Deaf identity. My family is Deaf, but I was embarrassed of ASL as a child because I did not know many other children whose families used it (two families from my mother’s church did, but I felt disconnected from these children). As a result, I did not begin learning ASL until I enrolled at Gallaudet, and three years later, I still feel awkward as a signer but consider myself fluent. My receptive skills are slow, yes, but this will probably not improve over time, as it is just a part of how I experience neurodivergency.