Traducción de un texto mio en LSE y también en inglés (Gracias a mi profesora)
TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL BEING A DEAF PERSON
To understand me, it is not enough to imagine being deaf for a while, but for the whole of your life. I mean, to feel that you belong to the world of silence, the place where you feel you can be yourself, where you can express whatever without any precautions.
To understand me, you must have gone through these situations that make you feel silly, embarrassed, or worse, helplessness. But in the end you get used to them because they always happen, because these are situations that happen any day.
Feeling ridiculous when you read some one´s lips wrongly and say something which makes this person laugh at your misunderstanding. It can be nonsensical for the rest of the people, but for deaf people it is not funny at all.
Feeling ashamed when you get wrongly the subject they are talking about and they want to know your opinion and it happens that what you say has nothing to do with what they were talking about.
(... Many times I wished that the earth swallowed me ...)
Feeling worthless when an accident happens and no one is around, only you and you have to call an ambulance but cannot do so because you cannot hear people speaking on the phone although you can talk. You can try to talk but you are never sure about if you will have been heard or not, and you feel helpless because you do not know what to do to get help.
Feeling discriminated when you're with your friends, all hearing people and they are talking about some interesting thing and laughing a lot, but not you because you cannot read everybody´s lips and so you get lost, and then you ask a friend if they could explain what they were talking about and they say "it is a nonsense, I'll tell you about it later". In the end, they never tell you about it or maybe they do in a such a brief version that it really doesn´t do.
Feeling helplessness with hearing people whether friends or acquaintances because one day we are watching a movie with funny dialogs which make them laugh and I feel forced to smile or laugh so that nobody realizes I have not understand anything because the movie had no subtitles.
If you want to put in a deaf person´s shoes, it is not enough just to say "I understand" or "I can imagine it" because deaf people´s lives can be the same as yours and at the same time very different. To know what a deaf person is you should put yourself in their place, know their world, communicate as they do, express with gestures and above all, feel that sign language is another language that can be beautiful and avoid saying "I understand" when later you show that you are an ignorant.