Jbenedict, 30

HOH looking for HOH and deaf friends I'm an 18-year-old HOH female who grew up in an all-hearing community. I'm the only HOH in my family, and I have felt like I've been denied half of my identity. I find deafness fascinating and will be starting university in August to study Cognitive Science, which I hope will eventually lead to a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience or Cognitive Linguistics. I want to study differences between hearing and deaf brains as well as monolingual and multilingual brains. Being HOH, I've always been the odd-one-out, and I love the idea of being a member of a wider community that understands the struggles of "Growing up hearing" when you're HOH and never really getting to cultivate the other side of your identity. I'm also interested in finding resources to help me learn to lipread as I have been growing increasingly frustrated with my communication difficulty.
I'm from Alaska but I'm currently living in Ecuador volunteering as an English teacher. I'll be going back to the States in June. I love being outdoors and camping, hiking, backpacking or just lying in the sun!
When I tell my family and friends I could see myself marrying a profoundly deaf or an HOH man, they say "Why would you do that to your children! They would almost surely be deaf or HOH." But I think that would be great. We'd be a multicultural household.

So I'm here to learn more about what other people have experienced and to crack open the door to the deaf community. I've taken one ASL course and I want to learn more. This is a community into which I'd love to be integrated!!