The Art of Being Deaf: A Memoir

Epilogue: The Sleeper Awakes

193 She leant across the picnic hamper and reached for my hearing aid in my open-palmed hand. I jerked away from her, batting her hand away from mine. The glare of the summer sun blinded me. I struck empty air. Her tendril-fingers seized the beige seashell curve of my hearing aid and she lifted the cargo of sound toward her eyes. She peered at the empty battery-cage before flicking it open and shut as if it was a cigarette lighter, as if she could spark hearing-life into this trick of plastic and metal that held no meaning outside of my ear. I stared at her. A band of horror tightened around my throat, strangling my shout, “Don’t do that!” I clenched my fist around the new battery that I had been about to insert into my hearing aid and imagined it speeding like a bullet toward her heart. My heart raced as if I’d been running for my life. I swung my legs around to the side of my bed and pulled myself upright into wakefulness. The back of my neck was damp with perspiration.I waited for my agitation to subside and went to the bathroom to splash cold water onto my face. The mirror showed me that the whites of my eyes were stained red. I had been crying in the dream. I rested my forehead on the cold enamel of the bathroom sink. Hearing aids are personal, intimate even. I protect them fiercely and rarely entrust them into the care of others, not even my closest friends. I certainly don’t like other people touching my hearing aids. It is a shocking breach of intimacy, like exploring my ears, using the tips of their fingers to Epilogue: The Sleeper Awakes K 194 Epilogue trace the outline of the vacuum where sound should echo. I don’t even like people looking at them for any longer than passing curiosity warrants.The crude handling by the woman in the dream was nightmarish. All the same, the ferocity of my reaction shook me. It made me stop and wonder. This dream was the first time in my life that I could recall being deaf in my dreams.Despite being born deaf and living in apparent harmony with my deafness all my life, my dream-self has no consciousness of being deaf. In my dreams, I hear sounds and conduct conversations with ease. Two nights later, my deaf dream-self asserted itself again. This time I woke with a sense of marvel. My dream had taken me to a commemorative event at the Gladstone Road Oral Deaf School at Dutton Park, which I attended in my early childhood. I was surrounded by my deaf friends, some speaking and some signing, but all of us chatting and laughing. My attention was distracted by the arrival of a newcomer. As he approached the group, I saw that it was a friend who is not deaf. I called out to him with joy, “Hello! What are you doing here?” He smiled at me, “I wanted to see what your early life was like,” and turning to greet my deaf friends, he signed his name, spelling it out letter by letter on his fingers with easy grace. His enthusiasm was infectious and prompted my friends to cluster around him, keen to teach him new signs. These two dreams came while I was writing this memoir. I had already been reflecting and writing for several years about my relationship with my deaf-self and the impact of my deafness on my life, but I remained uneasy about writing about my deaf-life. I had lived all my adult life apart from the deaf community; belatedly casting myself as a deaf woman with something pressing to say about deaf people’s lives felt absurd. The urgency to tell my story and my keenness to contest certain assumptions about deafness were real, but I was hampered by anxiety. I doubted my right to speak out.The dreams were potent, as if my deaf-self was not only asserting itself but also awakening me to the subtlety of the dance between my private deaf-self and my public deaf-hearing persona. ...