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234 Christy Smith I Am Deaf. See Me Roar I was always an impatient person. I came into this world three months before I was supposed to. I arrived on September 13, 1978, weighing less than the human brain—a measly two lbs. Months were spent in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit to help this little six-month-old preemie grow strong enough to function on her own. At one point, I pulled out the air tube that was helping me breathe, and this caused me to lose over 90 percent of my hearing. And so, my journey began. Much of my childhood was spent trying to fit in with the world around me—a world full of sound. Hearing aids, audiologists, speech therapy, lipreading. . . the list goes on. I have a deaf accent and I always will. Just learning how to say things correctly took years of work. I used the mirrors in my room to practice saying words. I was obsessed with speech so I could be as “normal” as possible. “Say Zeee bra, Christy.” “Neba.” “No, no. Zeee bra. ZEEE-BRA” “NEE-BRA” UGH. I did my best to lipread, although statistically, only 30–40 percent of all spoken sounds are visual in the English language. What I don’t see, I might hear with my hearing aid. A lot of times, figuring out what is being said is just “educated guessing.” This means that I will always be “two steps behind.” In my attempt to “expand my horizons,” I joined the cheerleading squad at my high school. They made adjustments for my deafness but I’d miss the name of the cheer or the count. There I was, yelling the wrong words in my deaf accent, and I was the only cheerleader to do the wrong movements. It took a few seconds to figure out what was happening, gather my bearings, and adjust to the cheer everyone else was doing. Incidents like this happened to me, an insecure deaf teenager, quite often. “Christy, we’re doing the ‘Go, Fight, Win Cheer’ so get ready.” What I heard was: “Christy, we’re doing the ‘Go, Skiers, Go Cheer’ so get ready.” “5,6,7,8. . .Go, Fight, Win Aspen Skierssss!” CRAP. Main_Pgs_1-330.indd 234 3/28/2012 10:24:57 AM Christy Smith 235 As I approached my junior year in high school, I decided to attend the Model Secondary School for the Deaf in Washington, D.C. It was a huge culture shock, especially since I wasn’t exactly fluent in American Sign Language (ASL), which was the language all the staff, students, and teachers used. Over time, I discovered a place in which my sense of belonging relied on my own personality. For the first time, my deafness was not considered a “disability.” “My name is Christy Smith,” was my new introduction. I was no longer the girl who had to do a long-winded introduction. “Hi, I’m Christy, I’m deaf, I have a hearing aid in my left ear and can’t hear out of my right so can you stand on my left side? Make sure you look at me when you talk so I can read your lips.” Now, my friends were those that I liked being around, not the ones who would hang out with me out of pity or who were easy to lip-read. When I participated in extracurricular activities, I didn’t have to rely on someone else to know what to do. After high school, I attended Gallaudet University, the only deaf university in the world, because I wanted to be in a place in which my deafness was the thing that bonded me to others, not the thing that alienated me from others. After college, I realized that my experiences in life showed that I was capable of doing anything. So I decided to prove it to the rest of the world. In 2002, I was a participant on the show Survivor: The Amazon. I was sitting in a makeshift shelter surrounded by the greatest rainforest in the world that contained a plethora of exotic creatures such as Amazon Morpho butterflies, anacondas, sloths, caiman, and piranhas . It was me, the cameramen, helicopters, security men, boom mikes, and 15 other Americans competing to be the sole survivor and walk away with a million dollars. It was the first time in the show that the men were pitted against the women in the beginning. I...

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