Language Undone

I was born in silence. In the first year of my life, my hands and my face were my only ways of communication. My curiosity was not limited by a lack of sound, and as an infant I absorbed the colors, shapes, textures, tastes, smells, and vibrations all around me. I spent much of my time on the floor—in part because walking is a skill that takes practice, but also because lying on the floor is the best way to experience the world. Through the floor, my body learned to recognize my father’s footsteps, a closing door, my sister’s excited hops, the calm ring of my mother’s laugh. I learned the different meanings of eyebrow and lip movements, which twitches meant worry and which meant laughter. My parents, both hearing, spoke endlessly to me, pressing my hands to their throats so I could feel the changes in pitch, the pauses in their words. I remember the warmth of their skin, the steady hum of their voices against my palms. They picked up elementary signs to teach me, pairing them as best they could with the words streaming from their mouths. My first signed word was “shoes,” two fists knocking together—sometimes I wonder if this wasn’t just an accidental bump of my knuckles. My pudgy fingers learned to fly. Soon my words soared through the air, my sentences sprouting wings, flying higher than my parents’ unpracticed eyes and hands could reach. But Mmy parents made the decision to raise me with hearing technology in the hearing world. This was by no means an easy choice, but the world has not been a kind place to Deaf people, and has been particularly unkind to Deaf women. My parents wanted their daughter to be safe, to be autonomous, to feel that this life was mine to create. *** I was one year old the first time a surgeon drilled into my skull. In a cochlear implant surgery, a small area of the skull is shaved away to create an indent in the shape of a tiny upside-down snowman, an exact match to the internal magnet which is placed in the indentation and cemented in with bone paste. Attached to the magnet is a string of electrodes, which are wound around the cochlea in place of cilia, the tiny hairs along which soundwaves dance to the brain. As a result of a recessive gene, GJB2 Connexin 26, my cochleas cannot receive sound properly. The cilia that transmit waves to my brain are absent, broken, bent, or lonely. Through two surgical procedures for cochlear implants, my cilia were replaced by electrodes spun through the spirals of my cochleas, which now receive electrical signals from an external processor. This leaves the bones in my ears without a job. I hope they are not too bored. There are three bones in each ear, named for a hammer, anvil, and stirrup. They bring vibrations from the eardrum to the inner ear by turning them into waves that can travel through the membrane and fluid of the inner ear. Their main function is to bring sound to the cochlea, which connects to the brain. The bones in my ears, dedicated to connecting my eardrums to my cochleas, must be very confused. Soon after getting hearing technology, my preschool teachers held my hands in my lap and I was taught to speak using only my mouth. For Deaf children that are turned into deaf children—assimilated into the hearing world through the use of hearing technology and verbal language—there is debate around continued use of sign language. Some believe that a focus should only be placed on spoken language, as it is assumed that young children will default to sign language if given the opportunity to use it freely. The first time a scalpel graced my skin it un-capitalized a letter, grazed my not-yet formed identity. The second time a scalpel stroked my flesh it cut away a language in my fingers. *** The human hands generally consist of twenty-seven bones each. Eight carpal bones, formed in a row between the wrist and the palm, five metacarpal bones reaching up to the fourteen phalanges that hide in the fingers. These bones are carefully situated so that the hand is flexible and can rotate freely. Two sets of twenty-seven bones working in tandem are used in nearly every human activity. My two sets of twenty-seven bones grew wings, flew too close to the sun, and were left stunted and slow. In my oralist early-intervention education program, my hands were not free. My eyes were trained to read lips and to maintain eye contact at the same time. I still rely on lips about thirty percent of the time, and more in poor acoustics. Reading lips is a skill that I tire of sometimes. Each person, regardless of their language, moves their lips and shapes their sounds differently. Each person I meet means a new pair of lips to learn. As a toddler I was presented with posters and books of cartoon faces squeezed into scary expressions, rewarded with smiles and cheers when I spoke and left my hands behind. Every year since I was one, I have been led into listening booths and told to repeat the words coming at me through a speaker until the heavy, sound-proofed door opens again. This process typically takes about three hours in total, and leaves me exhausted and drained for the next two days. I often grow increasingly tired as the tests go on, and I begin responding to beeps that haven’t played or saying nonsense words back to the speaker. *** I’ve always found it difficult to speak up. I’m not sure how much of this is due to being a deaf woman. I don’t trust my mouth to make the correct sounds. I am scared to take up space in the hearing world, terrified of what it may mean to remind those around me of my disability, of my constant accommodation of their language and lifestyle. Sometimes, a word will slip out of my lips coated in the Deaf accent I still sneak back into at night, and I will pray it goes unnoticed. I grew up being complimented on my clear language, on how invisible my disability was. My preschool classroom was a praise paradise, so I fell in love with hiding this part of myself. I was good at it, and even at that young age I understood that in order to succeed, hearing was the best thing I could be. I used to dream of waking up to noises instead of light. From a young age I knew I was supposed to speak up when I needed more. I was taught to advocate for myself, to explain my disability and to demand accommodations from reluctant ears and swatting dismissals. I was never taught how to say no to a man who was determined. I didn’t know how to run away from someone who showed me affection, even when he became an aggressor, attacked me in a way that seemed far too easy and familiar. Eighty-three percent of disabled women are sexually assaulted in their lives. I had watched a boy turn into a predator, naively believing that I didn’t make for easy prey. I fell into the hands of a boy on the hunt and found myself helpless. In all my training of how to gracefully need more, I hadn’t been taught when to walk away. Under his grip, my hands forgot how to fight as quickly as they forgot their first language, lay limp by my sides the way they were trained to. My protest, rough against my lips, lay in the air and settled along the dust on my cheek, pressed to the floor. *** When I was nineteen, a pulsing tattoo gun scraped along my right hip. A black-ink fine-line daffodil. I was in Minnesota, fighting to keep my body with me. I was a few months into my first year of college, in denial about the flashbacks that kept me awake and the nausea I couldn’t push down when I kissed new people. I told myself he couldn’t follow me here, told myself that was enough, and called my new ink a sign of how healed I was. Daffodils represent forgiveness and rebirth. A type of starting over that accepts the past. I was trying hard to be a daffodil. I wanted to be a flower, open and bright, standing tall on my stem. I wanted to cover up the handprints I felt along my hip with petals and leaves. The artist was rude, which felt unfair since she was dragging a needle through my skin. She started the appointment an hour late, glared at me when I presented a sketch of what I hoped the flower would look like, and silently drew her own version instead. Hers was much better than mine, and I quickly admired the purple outline along my skin before settling in for the session. She didn’t ask me what the tattoo meant, just told me to sit still. At one point she asked me, annoyed, if I was holding my breath. I was. Over the years I have collected more ink, sprinkled over me in whispers. Behind my ear hides a black-ink fine-line outline of the sun. My earliest memories are silent and bright. Fuzzy rays of warmth, dust floating and illuminated in front of a glowing window. The few mornings that I am left to wake without an alarm, I open my eyes to a shift in the light. The first moments of the day are my tired blinks and the beckoning brightness.