Deaf Utopia: A Memoir—and a Love Letter to a Way of Life

by Nyle DiMarco

As for how I felt about the hearing test results? Well, at the time I was most concerned with when my next meal of breast milk was going to be. After all, I had a twin brother to compete with.

Like any other way of living and being, there is some bad, but there’s also a lot of good to being Deaf. There have been times when it’s maddening and frustrating and I feel helpless. There have also been times when it’s downright glorious and I feel blessed and empowered to be this way.

As a Deaf person, I don’t have time to be upset at my own people. We can’t stop and point at each other. We have to be vigilant; we have to continue to look outward and battle the storm, created and imposed on us by larger society, that continues to rage all around us.

(That’s the quietest sound I’m able to hear, in decibels. Ninety decibels, the internet tells me, is about as loud as a roaring lawnmower.)

how it made me think that no matter how fluent I was in my natural language, ASL, it would never be enough. The hearing world has always placed a higher value on the ability to communicate using our mouths and has kept coercing Deaf people toward this method of communicating.

There is no separating the Deaf community from the hearing world. We have to coexist, and the way to do so is to give Deaf people the freedom to live and communicate the way we want to, which includes using sign language.