#BearsOfBaylor — “My whole family is Deaf.”

“My whole family is Deaf. My parents, my twin sister and some extended family members are all Deaf. I grew up in a home where American Sign Language was my first language. I’m a social work major, because I’ve seen oppression on a lot of different levels, and I’ve seen people discount my family just because they couldn’t hear. I’m really into helping people who feel like they don’t have a voice find their voice and make them heard.

“I’m not used to yelling someone’s name across a house. I’m very much a look-at-someone type of person. I don’t talk on the phone often because I’m so used to texting or Facetiming and signing with my family. It’s funny, other people would consider me the normal one in my family, but in reality, I was the different one. I was the only one in my household who could hear.

“A lot of people don’t consider Deaf culture to be its own culture or language, but if you look at the definition of both of those things, it has all of those things that classify it as a language and a culture. Really embrace it. If you just want to learn the alphabet, Deaf people love it. They want to know you want to communicate with them.”

[Every Baylor Bear has a story; #BearsOfBaylor brings those stories to you, one by one. These stories, these people… This is our Baylor.]