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32 Afterword My life wasn’t meant to be this way. Or maybe it was. “I don’t believe in an interventionist God,” sang Nick Cave in his achingly beautiful “Into My Arms.” Nor do I. “Jesus doesn’t want me for a sunbeam,” Kurt Cobain once crooned. Each of us is made of star dust, but sunrays are never made like me. The ancient Greeks believed three sisters were responsible for weaving the tapestry that is a life. Their names were the Fates. How different would my life have been if not for the death of my mother when I was a three-month infant, if not for deafness as a fiveyear -old? What kind of person could I have been? When I was twenty-two with shoulder-length curls and traveling Europe alone, a retired lawyer named Arthur confronted me, “I cannot see how your deafness can be a blessing.” Years passed. The unsolved riddle irked me. My conviction remained inarticulate until reading His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s interpretation of his exile and about China’s bloody reign over Tibet. This helped me reason perhaps my life’s most valuable lesson. My answer to Arthur is articulated in the following paragraphs. I was motherless and deafened at a young age. From a certain viewpoint , this double whammy is tragic. Yet, from another angle, I have been granted another perspective. I am continually presented with challenges able-bodied hearing people may never experience. Speech articulation and the intricate art of speechreading—both of which require a professional actor’s instinct—must be practiced lest they be lost. The threat of exclusion is always present when one has a disability, when one is deaf. One needs to consider ways to overpower this force. This requires creativity , a supple mind. Respect has to be won, earned. Few favors are granted. There is no time to pretend when dealing with demanding circumstances . No time to nod with sycophantic smiles, wear a mask, be content with discontents, or echo empty words. There is one choice 213 only—to be real. Hide and die. Truths are constantly confronted, many of them ugly. Like a gym junkie, I get enormous satisfaction in meeting these daily tests; they keep my soul strong, taut, and trim. I take great pride in this spiritual mettle. Perfect hearing and belonging to a nuclear family—two threads removed from my tapestry—are not necessarily passports to quality of life. Temptations to comfortably and mindlessly go through life are aplenty for those who have all the available sensory, mental, and psychological means. A life made too easy can come at the cost of arrested personal development , of perpetual psychic angst. My life could have been smoother, less adventurous. But it is likely that I could have gone through the motions , pretended. Love and work could have been attained more easily. I have seen the ease at which hearing peers acquire these crucial themes of social belongingness, the seeming effortlessness at which they blend in and exercise privileges of normalcy. I have been unlucky, the logic may follow. This is untrue. My less-than-ideal introduction to this world has forged a tenacity that has exposed me to people of different walks of life and to rich happenstances otherwise not met or experienced. So, in a sense, my “tragic circumstances” have been extremely useful. An Australian experience of deafness is not greatly different from that of an American, Briton, or that of any other nation with a dominant Western influence. Assistive hearing technology, education in mainstream scholarly institutions, mass use of electronic communications that require no hearing, captioned television programs and DVDs, and a widespread acceptance of people who are different—all have enabled me to function as an equal. These historical and cultural “accidents” were mostly unavailable twenty years ago. As a result, my independence, choices, and opportunities are comparatively phenomenal. I and many others who are deaf and enjoy a mainstreamed life have been winners in the birth lottery. We are the first to earn and be granted equality with the majority. I am the product of my age and Western culture. The odds—of being born in this specific age, in a country that provides benefits, and to a loving father—are several million to one, perhaps billions to one. I am neither-nor. I am neither hearing nor Deaf. That’s the way I like it. I am part of a new social entity...

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