We, who were born deaf, don't know what we are missing, therefore we are comfortable being Deaf.
I will say that I'm not comfortable being deaf, in spite of being deaf all my life. I'm one of those in between. I have one foot in the deaf world, the other in the hearing world. I see benefits in both (being able to sleep at night without noises yet enjoy music to the extent I can), but I also see hardships in both (there is an entire world I can experience that are closed to several manual deaf people, and yet I can't participate fully in the hearing world and need an interpreter in group situations).
I'm not accepted fully in either world. As a matter of fact, I'm not accepted anywhere except family, and I have no family here. I just straight up don't feel like I belong on this planet, but sorry for the thread hijack.
Robin, it IS a tragedy for a child sometimes. You have NO idea what I went through as a child. I was a hell-raiser because no one knew I was deaf until I was almost 7. I didn't communicate well enough until I was past 8. Until then, I had no way to get my needs met. I remember as a baby small enough that my head was under halfway up the height of the fridge door, and I remember Dad mouthing "What do you want" in a normal manner as he squatted down to me in the light of the fridge. I could barely see above the first shelf above the crisper. I had no way to communicate hunger. It was just there, and I had to lead Mom or Dad to the fridge. I was ANGRY when they couldn't understand. Or scared crapless when they didn't get what it was I was afraid of in the darkness of my bedroom.
However, here's another reason I was a hell raiser. I started uttering words before I was a year old, then at seven months (according to my baby book), I didn't pick up any more words until a few years later. I have memories of pointing out the ears in an anatomy book to Mom to get her to understand something was wrong with my hearing, and I must have been 3 or 4. However, what I don't remember is starting to cry and falling asleep on the anatomy book (Mom told me many years later in my 20s). THAT is a tragedy because I knew something was wrong. My adult sister pointed out that I might be deaf, and my parents got mad and wouldn't speak to her for a year, until she was proven right after my first audiogram was done, AFTER I had already gone through kindergarten AND failed the first grade in six weeks. I was passed around from caretaker to another and taken to a school for developmentally-delayed children until the audiogram. I don't even remember what happened there. I just remember something funny was going on there.
I remember sitting at my desk in school wondering why in hell I had to be there and what all these kids and the woman up front was doing. I wasn't wondering in words, just a feeling of exasperation, impatience, as I wanted to go outside to play. I remember students standing up in kindergarten for some reason and looking at this long thing at the top of the ceiling from one end to the other (the alphabet), every day. I had no idea what they were doing.
This is not a place or topic where I want to get politically correct. This is the truth. I AM deaf. I HAVE a disability. The senses are there to provide a defense. Sight lets you avoid dangerous animals and situations, smell alerts you to the same thing you may not be able to see or hear, hearing lets you know what animals you might be faced with and whether they are likely to attack, touch lets you know you might be where it's dangerous to you (fire, extreme heat, hypothermia-inducing cold, etc.), and taste lets the naturally-living humans know if they are eating the appropriate foods intended for their digestive classification AND gears the digestive system for appropriate gastric secretions based on what foods they are eating.
If one of these senses are missing, you do have a disability because your ability to survive in the natural world is reduced, meaning you could walk off a cliff or straight into a bear's den, not smell a killing area where there might be animals on the defensive as they eat, hear predators in time to avoid them and get away from them, burn yourself badly when you pick up a previously-used-but-still-hot cooking rock and hold it for more than a few seconds (in the natural world, you can die from an infection of a burned area), or eat tainted or unripe food. In the natural world, you can die. People still do in a civilized world.
The only way you could realistically say that deafness is not a disability is if there is another world out there where ears and the sensation of hearing sounds is not evident anywhere in the world, maybe because of something different about the physics of that world (something about the physical characteristic of living and nonliving matter that prevents sound generation). The fact IS, you were designed to have ALL five senses present and operating, but something went wrong, regardless of whether you miss or missed it, or plain didn't know you were supposed to be able to do this or that. I would guess to the person who's never heard before and doesn't know what she's missing, deafness is not a disability. But in the scheme of things, as I said before, you're supposed to have all senses operating, as that is part of the design of the modern human body, plain and simple.
I accept the fact that I have a disability in spite of the fact that I don't let me stop me from working on the sales floor in the camping department, I don't let it stop me from developing my speech skills in different languages to the extent I can, I don't let it stop me from playing music and enjoying my favorite live bands, and so on. I am aware that there are a few things I can't do. A lot, actually. I can't serve in the military at any level, I can't pilot a plane in most situations, I can't work as a paramedic, I can't work where communication via phone/radio is required. I know that I could do those things physically, but there are situations where it's dangerous or liability is involved. That is a LOT. I've accepted this and learned to live with my limitations.
