As winter approaches, and the sun goes down at 5pm up here, I find myself feeling alone. It's not a terrible loneliness, and I can handle it, but I've noticed a downside to being deaf and traveling alone. Being deaf brings large communication problems, because most people only speak their languages and visual languages like ASL are not as widespread. So in a lot of ways being deaf is like living in a foreign country where you don't know or speak the local language.
That is to say, all of that means its hard to meet new people, and form relationships. It's not impossible , just hard. I wasn't born deaf , and all my alone travels have all been (until now) back when I was able to speak and understand the local language. So it was pretty easy to have interesting conversations wherever I happened to be, and now I've noticed that is most difficult, most people are confused or turned off from communicating with me.
So this had been a very interesting experience, now my connections with people are much much less than they ever have been before. I know there is at least one other deaf person around this forum, so I wanted to bring it up. Be prepared for loneliness.
Luckily I'm pretty comfortable with myself, and I have friends in many places around the country, so I have ways to deal with it, but I do find, that during the northern winter, when it's dark at 5, it's a lot more difficult to deal.
I'm doing ok, I text my friends and kids all the time, so I'm not without some interactions, but they don't make up for in person human to human interactions. Perhaps if I continue to find this an issue I may look into a dog or something sooner. I have diverse hobbies and am in the process of trying to teach myself to knit, which is really me just making more messes to clean up, but hopefully with time my messes will be a little less drastic <img src="/images/boards/smilies/smile.gif" border="0" align="absmiddle">
Also next week I get to see the kids again, so that will fix me right up! And then I'll have a busy social schedule thru December and then it's RTR time! <img src="/images/boards/smilies/wink.gif" border="0" align="absmiddle">
Anyways, just wanted to chime in on loneliness, since I have a little bit of that going on right now.
With love,
Tara