Dreaming in signs: My experience taking beginning ASL
When I pushed through the large glass doors of Berkeley City College, I felt excited for new learning. I was on my way to my first American Sign Language (ASL) class. The class would run for 7-weeks, Mon-Thurs, 1:30-5:50pm, and before it even began, the thought of spending so many hours at a time stuck in a classroom had terrified me. It brought back all my old fears of how miserable I was in college. (Being in graduate school at CIIS has opened my eyes to why traditional education was never a good fit for my neurodivergent brain.) And yet, I was truly interested in learning ASL (that element of desire is a crucial element for those of us with learning differences). Sign language was expressive by nature and maybe it would prove useful in my career as expressive arts therapist. My board of advisors (my husband; and my therapist) both said essentially the same thing—give it a try, and if you hate it, you can always quit. So, to make things official, I sewed a cool patch onto my backpack. As I walked up the stairs, and down the hall, I reminded myself: I’m doing this for personal enrichment, not for a grade; I can leave anytime.
As I entered the 20’ x 20’ windowless classroom, my balloon of elation quickly deflated. Fluorescent lights, brown industrial carpeting, teacher’s desk at center front, whiteboards, and projector screens behind her; and lining the side and back walls were the student desks, those combo chair-desk single entity things. My inner voice gave a quiet whelp, oh no, what have I gotten myself into?
I had forgotten about those desks, and how they create a subtle feeling of being locked in due to the maneuvering that is required to be free from them. Approaching the teacher, I tried to introduce myself and make sure I was in the right class. She smiled and signed something, but we couldn’t understand each other. A wave of light panic passed over me. I turned to the few others who were seated at desks, and asked out loud, is this the ASL beginner class? They all just shrugged their shoulders, and shook their heads. It was disorienting and added to my nervousness, but I decided to wait till the class started, and maybe more would be revealed. Once the class began, I learned that the ‘deer in headlights’ thing is a common phenomenon among us speaking folks who are brand new to the Deaf community.
The first two days we had translators, and we were able to talk and ask questions. From day three and thereafter, we were on our own. There was no more speaking allowed in the classroom and all communication had to be conducted by alternate means. This was the day my overwhelm kicked in. Our teacher was profoundly Deaf, with an amazing awareness of sound nonetheless, and she homed in right away on my habit of talking to myself when I read or am spelling something. This is something that I know I do, and it helps my comprehension and focus. I whisper out loud while writing, or when there is too much exterior distraction around and I am trying to read. But here the teacher was telling me to try and not do it, because it would work against me in ASL. This seemingly tiny thing made my brain go haywire and I got teary—not full-on crying, mind you (that came later that evening)—but just enough to have my eyes water, and my chest tighten. And just enough to make me doubt I was a good fit for this class. When class ended that day, I wrote a note on my phone and showed it to the teacher: it said I didn’t think I’d be coming back next week. She wrote back that any accommodations I needed were fine, that I could take as many breaks as I needed, and she urged me to text her over the weekend, with sincere hopes that I would not drop the class.
All I could think was: I’ve worked hard to align with my personal learning style and what my brain needs—I’m in graduate school, for goodness sake! — but now I have to quickly change my learning strategy? I’m not a young learner, I’m 48 (one year older than the teacher, as I discovered later). What the hell had I done?
I took the next three days to emotionally repair and steady myself.
That Monday, I found myself back in the class. And each Monday after that. At the end of every day, my brain was saturated. And yet, I was learning how to sign. Every evening on BART, and then getting in my car, I felt physically and mentally tired in a way that was definitely not sustainable. My emotional body felt zapped and I was cranky a lot. Yet somehow, after recuperating each weekend, I found a reason to go back. The teacher’s positive energy and storytelling style of instruction were big assets; she was also funny and a brilliant mime. I was indeed learning so much, and it was sticking. At the beginning of most classes, our teacher would tell us a story, it would include the signs we had learned thus far, and sometimes new ones. You could tell who was understanding her stories by who laughed at the punch lines. There were not many. Out of 30 students, there were six of us who seemed to be getting it.*
Understanding more than you can speak is typical when learning a new language. But with ASL, it helps immensely to have an expressive face and a penchant for dramatic effect (ahem). It is quite interesting just how much can be conveyed through eyebrows alone.
My brain was forging new neural pathways and as I mentioned, there were many days of overwhelm and exhaustion. This makes sense, as I was learning something totally new and totally different than anything I had done before. Also, the classroom environment, just the fact that there were no windows felt oppressive and constricting. And not to be overlooked was the thing I had been most scared of initially, the sheer length of each class, which on most days meant we were in that room for 4.5 hours. Yes, for sure we had short breaks in there, but 4.5 hours is too long for a class. We learned that this 7-week class is the same material taught in a fall or spring class (which is around 16 weeks).
On Thursday July 20th, with more week to go, I had a remarkable dream.
I am in the garage of a building. My underground programming, my animal nature. There is an attendant who has a giant white wolf like in Game of Thrones. The she wolf is beautiful but untrained, like a wild puppy. My mom and I pull up our car and are unloading our stuff to go upstairs. The wolf is running to and fro, wild, without restraint. She scares us, and I asked the attendant to restrain her. He does so by chaining her front foot to a bolt on the floor, but he does it by putting the bolt through the wolf’s foot. The wolf is bleeding yellow. He puts her close to the elevator, which means we must still walk by her, and she is snarling. This was not very helpful, and yet I feel so sad for the wolf at the same time. I get mad at the attendant and accuse him of not loving the wolf: “Well you obviously don’t love her if you’re doing that to her”, I exclaim. The attendant gets very upset by this, and I apologize: “I’m sorry you’re right, that’s not fair of me to say”. My mom is gone, having disappeared upstairs when she had the chance, leaving me to clean up her mess. So now it’s me and Wolf. I don’t want to deal with her scariness, and I don’t want her harmed by the restraints, either. Why is there not another way?
Notably, July 20th had been my grandma Judy’s birthday, a connection I didn’t make until later that weekend, when I revisited the wolf dream and wrote this in my journal:
Do I have a need to demonstrate hardship/suffering to feel legitimate, to appear to others that I am working hard? Must I suffer to know that I am worthy?
Suffering is part of the human condition. Things that are too easy are questioned as having merit. When something is effortless, it can appear as though we are skating along, which gives the appearance that we may be getting something for nothing. A recent NYT article about staying fit after 40 said something like, ‘we don’t get better by doing what’s easy’.
I get that. And I knew that I had reached my boiling point. Was it wrong to quit now, with only the final exams left to go? But that dream! I am the wolf. Wasn’t she telling me not to keep hurting myself? That classroom had become the bane of my existence. I couldn’t take being in that windowless room any longer, or in those chairs, or having so little personal space, and for all those hours on end. All those high school kids who had the most expressionless faces…did they even own eyebrows? And there was the group of class clown 15-year-old boys who could not stop laughing. On one day about four weeks in, I snapped at the boy next to me, saying, “Dude, SHUTUP!” I apologized during the break.
With the final exams looming next week, and my mind still unmade, a bit of wisdom appeared by way of a Steph Curry documentary. Sonya said to Steph something like, “Well you can quit now. But if you think this has some value, then don’t give up yet”; my husband swears he said the same thing to me ;)
When Monday arrived, I showed up. I took the final exams that week, and finished the course with an A. I am still processing the experience.
*Some demographics: Out of 30 students, the majority were in high school, with five of them being 14 years old. Three or four others were 21 - 22 years (freshmans/sophomores in college), and there was a couple who were a little older than me, they were parents to a 17-year old daughter who was also there learning ASL, and they were there to support her.