My Deaf Experience

Basically Deaf for a Day is when you wear earplugs the entire day to replicate the life of a deaf person. Everyone who participated in this event did their own variations with this assignment. Some people talked normally, some people strictly signed only, some wrote notes, and what I did was sign and talk at the same time. In all honesty, I kind of participated because the earplugs would keep falling out in the middle of the day and it just became frustrating, so I didn’t wear them. The thing about the earplugs is that it doesn’t block out any noise. Although I didn’t wear the earplugs, I still treated the day as if I was wearing them. I wouldn’t stick in my earphones to listen to music, or I’d watch television with the volume off. The experience

Sure, deaf people are similar to us hearing people and the only difference is that they can’t hear. The thing is though, it made me realize that it must be so hard. An example is music. I love music, I listen to it every day, I play an instrument, I truly can’t go a day without music. So not being able to listen to music was so difficult for me to do because it was stripping the one thing that relaxes me throughout the day. It truly changed my perspective on deaf people, because I know they can’t hear the lyrics or the rhythms, and I feel like that it must feel difficult not being able to relate or have a “go-to” like that, where it helps relieve you from stress. Although I found this assignment challenging and made me feel bad for the deaf not having some of these privileges, I keep remembering that, that’s what makes them unique. Although they can’t hear music, they can feel it and still dance to it. Although, they don’t speak using their voice, their hands do it in such elegance that it’s difficult to describe. So yes this changed my perspective by showing me that they don’t experience the same things, but it also made me realize that it doesn’t make them different from us because we each face our own