End of the Semester Thoughts

Endings.

The end of a semester, the end of a year. At endings, it’s tough not to be reflective.

 

2018 has been a year full of changes and I have grown a lot over the past 12 months. I’ve gotten a new incredible job, got a degree from one school, started at a different university, been given the opportunity to preach and help lead a church for two months, led a mission trip, and have begun to realize what I’m supposed to be doing in my life.  I saw Ed Sheeran for the third time, have traveled out of Nebraska a good amount of times, won some national trophies, and even got to be in the ocean again this year.  All in all, it has been a really good year with a lot of growth.

However, 2018 is a year I will remember for a long time, because for the first time in my life, I failed a test. 

…And it wasn’t a test I could study or prepare for: my hearing test in June.  

It seems to be this common thing that confusing things happen to all of us throughout our lives, but at some point, we are able to look back and connect all of the dots.  

You see, going into college, I thought I was going to be a music teacher.  My entire childhood was filled with music, and that had become my identity.  I was Hannah, the girl who played so many instruments, sang, danced, and was in every District Music ensemble possible at her school.  Everything about my life had to do with music: most of my relationships were built around a common love for it.  I also liked being a drum major and conducting in class, so I figured maybe ‘music teacher’ was the path for me.  It felt like an obvious choice at the time – every one of my mentors told me it was a good fit for me.  I picked a university that I felt had the best music education program in the area, but then the entire summer before I left, I knew it was wrong.  I knew that wasn’t on the path God had for me.  So, after a week of feeling like I was in the complete wrong place, I transferred home and went to Metro, a school I never wanted to attend - but ended up really enjoying.

Then last fall (2017), my mom and I were looking for a new show to watch, and we stumbled across Switched at Birth.  That was basically my first experience with any of the Deaf culture.  As a hearing person up until that point, I never knew there was a community, a culture, or an identity that went along with hearing loss.  I began to really fall in love with learning sign language as much as I could.  I had learned the alphabet in middle school for a project I had done, and had learned to sign a few songs throughout the years, but I’d never really known much about it.  I looked into sign language interpreting programs, feeling this connection to something I knew nothing about.  I found that UNO was one of the few schools that had an interpreting program – the school I was planning on transferring to anyway! I took that as some kind of a sign. But I was frustrated, because my schedule at MCC didn’t line up enough for me to be able to start taking the ASL classes I’d need to transfer to UNO for the interpreting program.  I was confused as to why I felt so connected to ASL, but it wasn’t working out.

This spring, I began to be pushed back into the Methodist church, which I have previously written about how the Holy Spirit moved through the people around me to get to me.  The connection I felt there had me abandon my plans of moving to Omaha and transferring to UNO.  I decided to transfer to Midland to stay at Fremont First UMC.

Then, after a flight home from Cleveland this spring, I thought my ears were just messed up from the plane.  After a few months and a load of doctors, I ended up taking my first hearing test.  I got into the weird box, and felt like I was being experimented on.  I figured, like every other medical testing I’ve had done throughout my life, it wouldn’t matter.  This would just be another test that wouldn’t give me any answers.  So, I wasn’t expecting to be told I had permanent hearing loss and that I should get a hearing aid.  [The cause is still fairly unknown – more to follow on this as I continue to go to doctors and have testing done.  Meniere’s is still a possibility.]

Suddenly, things started to click a bit.  God pulled me out of a music education program because there’s no way I would be getting through my junior year as a music major with hearing loss.  (Hello, I lost a job this summer due to my hearing loss, and that just required me to play a guitar, not be graded on my musical abilities.  And I am barely hearing what’s happening in my classes anyhow.)  My connection to ASL made sense.  And, having been exposed to the idea that hearing loss is an identity and not an impairment has helped me to cope a lot with what is happening. The loss of my identity as a musician doesn’t mean I’m losing my identity in total.

However, that doesn’t mean that this is easy.  My hearing loss has made me aware of many things about this world that really get under my skin. 

That starts with the lack of accessibility I have in church.  I go to services that spend time on music I cannot hear very well, and when I close my eyes to pray in service, I can’t hear the prayer being said.  There are so many aspects about church that I am left out of with hearing loss.  And that’s in a place I feel connected to and where people care about me.

So, I think I have finally figured out where God is pushing me.  I’ve connected a lot of the dots of my past: my call to ministry, my call to lead, my hearing loss, my passions, and my experiences.  I’m going to work on the path to being ordained as a deacon in the United Methodist Church.  I want to work specifically on disability advocacy, and work to make churches accessible to Deaf people, and to people with all kinds of disabilities.  I want to make Deaf ministries exist in more than mega-churches.  Right now, my options for hard-of-hearing-friendly churches really begin and end with Christ Community Church in Omaha (which is a bit farther than I’d prefer to drive, and I don’t really love mega-churches.  I love MY church, I just wish it was more accessible for me).  I want ASL to be taught to as many people wanting to learn it.  I want deaf children of hearing parents to be better connected to their families by opening their doors of communication. I want to make church services accommodate the deaf community better than they do – churches in all places.  And for people with other disabilities, I want to make churches more accessible. Eventually I want to expand my work, also making churches safer places for people with mental illnesses and for survivors of sexual assaults and intimate partner abuse.   

It’s incredible, because recently, I found this list of places deacons work, and reading it is just like “click, click, click” – all of my passions, all of my majors, all of my ideas about what I was supposed to be doing, well, they all click.  I can work in congregations with Christian education, a passion I have with my youth ministry work.  I could work in mission outreach.  My passion for the criminal justice field would not be lost, as I could be involved with prison ministries, reentry ministries, group homes, community outreach, and even legal aid! My chemical dependency counseling degree could be used through rehabilitation ministries and pastoral care and counseling work. I’ve considered being a nurse, but the chaplaincy in hospitals is more of how I want to be involved in healthcare, which I could do as a deacon.  Other options are disaster relief, homeless ministry, campus ministry, and work on social justice advocacy organizations, all of which I love being involved in as much as I can be now. And, there are even more things on the list I’m interested in.  However, it was the inclusion of the following two things on the list that really tugged at my heart: language or culture ministries and disability advocacy.   That fits right in with the pull I feel to make our churches places that are much more welcoming to the Deaf community and ASL.

This is what I’m meant to do, y’all.  All of my passions are finally being connected in one place. I know I’ve shared plans with you many times.  But this is the one that feels right for me, the one God is breathing into me. 

But Church isn’t the only place I have been left out of parts of due to my hearing loss.  It’s tough to communicate with people. I’ve been trying to learn to read lips, but it is not an exact science.  Though sometimes offering funny anecdotes to tell later, it’s not always funny in the moment when I completely misread what someone says.  Also, Midland doesn’t have resources for hard of hearing folks like me, so I don’t always feel super welcome there.  I am trying to learn about my identity as a person with hearing loss, but at a school where I’ve only ever met one other person with a hearing aid, that is a bit tough.  This was also my first semester with ADA accommodations, and it has been quite different.  As an auditory learned, I’ve had to change my learning style quite a bit this semester.

I am worried about learning ASL, and I am worried about the other people in my life learning it as well so there is a point in me learning it – so I can communicate, hopefully also with my loved ones. And though I’m so excited to be going back to Ohio in the coming weeks, this time the trip is accompanied with worry about how well I am going to be able to communicate with my loved ones in a group.  With about 20 of us all circled around each other talking in a group, I know I’m not going to be able to catch everything that is said, and that bums me out.

In other reflective news, this semester has been incredibly rough for me.  The past few weeks especially have been incredibly bad mental health weeks for me.  This semester’s classes have been relatively easy, but not being challenged frustrates me, and I did not expect that.  My classes still gave out plenty of time-occupying assignments, many of which have happened over the weeks since Thanksgiving, and I feel burnt out.  I have been taking classes since August of 2016 with only minimal, couple-week breaks between them.  I have decided NOT to take a class in January, and I am ready for a much-needed break from classes. However, I am also worried about having January off with my seasonal depression, so I am looking for activities to keep me from trouble in that regard.  I’ll still be working; however, my day times will primarily still be free.  But I am SO EXCITED to not have to read a textbook in the next 45 days. (I get to read what I WANT, WHAT?!) I have my stack of half priced books I might actually make it through! I can get out my paints and take walks again…free time I’ve not known in like, 27 months.

I’m hoping to be writing more again now that I have some time off.  I think I’m going to write a bit about what I know about Deaf culture and how I want to be more involved with it, and learn more about my identity. 

Thanks for reading my end-of-the-semester thoughts,

-       Hard of Hearing Han