Anastasia Aston: How the Deaf community helped heal my relationship with the hearing world

I moved across three different countries during my childhood, went to their local schools and learned their languages from scratch.

This didn’t feel like a challenge – it was the best part of growing up, learning that there is a wider world out there, the joy of mastering several languages and knowing that people are people everywhere. Cultures were different for complex reasons.

But bridging between my deafness (profound since birth) and the hearing world has been my blindspot and biggest challenge. It started in my late teen years actually.

I was born in Russia, and went to a deaf boarding school since I was 3. Other deaf children were my only world until I was 12 when my parents had enough of what they saw as my poor quality deaf education and my very low reading age.

When we went back to Russia after Germany, my parents decided I was best off being mainstreamed. Jumping into the deep end of the pool was the only way, with the intense Soviet-style National Curriculum and being expected to be able to write complex essays suddenly.

No such thing as deaf units in Russian schools. All kids with special needs just went to special schools.

My poor teachers had no guidance, many knew better than to mark me down for my nearly non-existent spoken Russian language.

Some were more accommodating and more willing to work with me than others. Same for my peers. They saw me as an addition to the environment they had to learn to integrate into.

Again, some kids were more willing than others. Many girls took me under their wing in exchange for me helping with their maths homework and me signing to them to avoid being humiliated at the blackboard in front of the class. The memories are happy. I was the ‘deaf in mainstream’ success story.

I had a experience in German mainstream school. It was when I started GCSEs on the day I arrived in UK that I started to feel my deafness as hindrance acutely.

Ironically, this was the country that generously provided Communication Support workers in schools and every TV programs with subtitles. The most inclusive country in the world.  

While I rapidly picked up English slang and idioms from TV, fitting in with the peers had become a bit of struggle. Turns out I wasn’t the first foreigner to complain about being kept at arm’s length by British people.

It was as if they were saying: ‘We have already thrown money at you and declared our love for diversity, now can you leave us alone’.

Fear not, I told myself. University would be a better place.

Hello dreamy spires of Oxbridge! No more world of muggles! The place where people would see what I have between my ears in the head, not external manifestations of my deafness.

While I watched other awkward students blooming and thriving in the right environment, I was slowly imploding inside the ancient buildings of Cambridge.

The bouncing ideas off each other and resonance of minds I dreamed about didn’t materialise. Chronic social deprivation from the years before were starting to really show.

I lacked appropriate airs and graces. The fellow freshers who initially made an effort, had their enthusiasm (“you are so different! You are so brave!”) wear off soon and I gave up on them too. Social anxieties intensified, but putting my head down and working hard was all I knew.

There were shimmers of good friendships but when zoomed out, the years at university seemed like a barren landscape.

Does knowing heart-stabbing depths of chronic disconnect in the midst of big groups, talks, social clubs and societies count as valuable experiences?  The Disability Office said they only provide support for lectures, which I did not need.

Instead of pushing forward and navigating around the complex communication barriers, I hid behind my hearing boyfriend (and now husband) who proved to be a portal between me and the hearing world.

He encouraged me to speak for myself in conversations by lipspeaking and gently drawing me into the hearing world. His advice was “Hearing people don’t know what to do, please be kind on them and break the barriers down for them”.

This was the advice that did not make sense and I ignored for many years while experiencing painful perceived rejection one after another.

To me, my husband was a daft person blinded by love who didn’t see in me what hearing people were seeing – I was a useless and deeply unlikeable waste of space, with insufficient talents to compensate. Films like “Wonder” and “Rain man” made out people needed to be highly extraordinary to be accepted.

You may ask, why didn’t I stand up and advocate for myself more? Did I have deaf friends throughout all those bad years? The short answer was no, the longer answer is – I had a few online friends who lived far away. Local deaf people weren’t there when I was looking for them.

Until I found them a few years ago. The experience of being able to converse freely and not being looked down upon was so exhilarating, the heavy lid has been lifted and my confidence soared.

I could compare my ease of straight to heart communicating with deaf people of various backgrounds to my communicating with the majority of ‘soulless’ hearing people who never seemed to be capable of progressing beyond “small talk” with me.

I started to truly appreciate where difficulties lay in the vast complexity of inter-cultural and multimodal communications.

People are never truly as open-minded as we’d like to think. Now cognitive bias has been identified, we can work with them as not all of the problems were a result of me never being enough for anybody. What my poor husband and a few ‘nice’ hearing people (you know who you are) have been trying to say for YEARS!

Fast-forward a few years now, my hearing kids have a Deaf music teacher with several interesting projects on hand. Our kitchen table currently has a book lying on it, published by my deaf friend. My family can fingerspell and do some BSL. My kids watch and play out BSL Zone comedies in addition to Russian and English films.  I have presented Deaf Awareness at my work and now we are into organising BSL workshops.

I’m also kinder and more assertive with hearing people who don’t know what to do and know that communication difficulties aren’t necessarily an immutable condition.

Hearing people are also looking more human to me as result, instead of ‘those people with too much power to oppress and exclude’.

As Brene Brown says: “Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”

Our lives are surrounded by the full spectrum of deaf people and hearing people from all over the world, we can belong to both worlds and we are all truly richer for it.

When not making up for lost time, Anastasia can be found either in her job managing computer systems or with her husband and three children.