Deaf

   Can you imagine a world without sound?  You can see people moving their mouths and waving their arms, but you have no clue what they’re saying.  Some people say that waterfalls are soothing, but to me they’re just falling water.  I don’t have a favorite movie, because I can’t understand them.  Hard life don’t you think?

     I was born in a small town in Pennsylvania.  I had a pretty good life early on, but I had no friends.  I had to go to a special school and learn sign language, so I could finally learn how to communicate with others.  I met my first real friend in fourth grade.  She was a deaf girl just like me.  Her name was Lucy.  Lucy and I would play with little paper dolls my dad would make.  We would make them do sign language and talk using them instead of our real hands.  Lucy died of meningitis two years later, the same disease that had made her deaf since birth.  I sobbed so hard I could swear that I heard it faintly.   Eventually I recovered and made several new friends at my school, but it was never quite the same. 

     In seventh grade I picked up my first hobby, playing tennis.  You can play tennis perfectly fine without the ability to hear.  I learned quickly and my parents set up a net in my backyard for me to practice.  I got pretty good at it, but there were no local teams, so I couldn’t play competitively except against my friends. 

     High School for me was pretty boring.  I hung out with friends, but there wasn’t much to do.  We couldn’t have very long conversations, because our hands started to cramp up after a while.  I played more tennis at home and went to school.  I decided that I wanted to be a writer, because my disability didn’t limit me.  I joined my school’s newspaper staff and started writing articles.

     Once I graduated from high school I got a job with a local newspaper.  The job is really fun.  I don’t usually write articles about myself.  But today I did.  This is my story.