Easy Beauty: A Memoir

People make spaces I cannot enter, teaching me how forgotten I am, how excluded I am from “real life.”

“Because you weren’t thinking,” I’d said and left it at that, but what I thought was, Because you weren’t thinking of a deaf person as a whole person.

My familiar defense mechanism was taking over, which was to feel superior while abstracting to theory.

I’d spent my life waiting for people to reach their place of comfort with my disability so that they’d forget about it and then I could be seen. Of course, I’d succeeded only in erasing a part of myself.

I like the thought that what I seek will be discovered if only I can withstand what others cannot, that pain has purpose, that I’m not lost, but just on the harder path.

I feel only the constant strain of translation. He could love me but not know me. What was I trying to beat to the punch? What was I evading?

They saw absence, lack. But I, having only ever been in my body, did not feel lacking. Going up the stairs feels like going up the stairs. Walking feels like walking. It looks strange, I guess, to those who watch me. It looks lesser. But I had no reason to feel lesser. That would require lessons, for which I had many willing teachers.

Not being of the world was precisely what made me better, wiser, a philosopher, my soul gold and the others’ iron. These theories contained in them a superiority, and once I embraced it, it kept me aloft, saved me from further descent. Judgment became a powerful antidote to despair. I thought: If I must exist at a distance, let it be from above.

As kids, we’d both been compelled to derail experiences we felt excluded from. We’d believed and placed all our self-worth on the notion that to assert yourself against the crowd was a form of higher-level thinking, which sometimes it was and sometimes it was cowardice.