Incidental social isolation.

The fond memories tied to the Langley house mentioned in my last post mostly happened outside the house rather than inside it.

My parents made the decision to relocate to Langley in 1995 after my siblings moved out to free me from a life of continued isolation.

There, I was within walking distance from my school and eight deaf kids with whom I had varying degrees of friendship.

It was the best thing they’d ever done for me. I could have done without the big house with the 800-gallon fish tank in the rec room, hot tub, pristine living room carpet, a backyard that was a mushroom paradise, and so on.

None of that mattered as much as being close to my friends.

On the downside, it made Mom believe that I was forever indebted to her and Dad for the sacrifices they made. It was her winning ticket to every argument we’d have, even after I moved out.

Life at home was difficult, but at least I finally had a life outside of the house.

It may seem dubious to claim that my siblings and I had a rough childhood when we had as much as we did, but we were all out of the house before we were even legal adults. I don’t think that lends to the idea that living with the parents was tolerable. In my case, once I graduated high school, I was pushed out so that my parents could live out their empty nest fantasy, but that’s a story for another day.

Anyway, from age 3-11, I was socially isolated, and again from 17-now. My social isolation peaked in Montréal, where I had no deaf friends to sign with in the four years I lived there. I still had many friends across the country who were a text or IM away.

The internet saved me from feeling truly isolated.

Comedian Michelle Wolf wasn’t far off with her joke about blogs being “a conversation no one wanted to have with you.” For me, though, they’re conversations I couldn’t have. I don’t have the luxury of starting up a conversation–or participating in them–when I’m out and about.

How else am I supposed to connect with people? Interpretative dancing? Puppetry? Telepathy? Acceptance of Jesus?

I have conversations with myself all the time because I am socially isolated. Then I share these conversations with you. A lifetime of experience is why I’m not finding the social isolation aspect of the pandemic difficult.

EXCEPT!

The pandemic has flooded my social media feed with non-captioned posts created by people who are trying to combat social isolation. Video after video of moving mouths conveying messages meant for everybody–well, except for the deaf community. It’s not just from random people I follow on Instagram, but people who know me in some capacity.

Maybe they figure it’s not such a big deal to exclude one person. Maybe they’re sharing the same sort of nonsense I often share here and have the idea that only vital information needs to be made accessible.

That’s the thing: I don’t even know. I can’t ignore the constant, in-your-face exclusion as I don’t know which videos are inaccessible unless I check them out. All these moving mouths might as well be saying:

“You are not important enough to me.”

“You are not important enough to me.”

“You are not important enough to me.”

YOU’RE MAKING ME FEEL SOCIALLY ISOLATED… ONLINE. Connected online, yet disconnected from a large part of the world? WHAT THE FUCK.

So, when I came across Loni.Friedmann’s post in which she expressed her frustrations in ASL–accompanied by captions that she added manually–my feelings were validated. Since then, hundreds of deaf people, myself included, have shared her post.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed how annoyingly overlooked the deaf community was from the masses’ effort to overcome social isolation.

Now that hearing people are experiencing isolation, you’d think they’d have more empathy for us. Obviously, excluding the deaf community was not something they set out to do, but is it better if the effort to include us isn’t there either? Especially when apps that convert speech into text exist?

We are all in this together, my foot!

Last summer, I witnessed hearing people lose their minds over BC Ferries’ poor communication when BC Ferries had to cancel multiple sailings due to the weather.

It was like, “Okay, I guess we agree that access to information is important.”

Yet the response is often more or less, “Yes, but not for you.” I’m not permitted to get angry for constantly being denied access to information. But the one time it happens to hearing people–and not even in totality? Unacceptable! How can I expect access to everyday ramblings on Instagram when hearing people barely think we deserve access to vital information?

I haven’t been sharing videos of myself signing because my front-facing camera is ruined, and I’m actually more fluent in written English anyway. Though, I did it once, last summer, to ask the signing deaf community a question. Then, I made a follow-up post about it that generated more than quadruple the views I usually get on my posts.

I get it: people hate being left out. Do you get it?