Who invited the hearing girl to deaf night?

  A challenge was thrown out by my friends to do something outside the norm.  After thinking about it, I chose to attend a deaf event.  Why would I choose that?  Because for the past year I have been dabbling into learning American Sign Language.  I picked up letters, numbers, colors and the first hundred basic signs pretty quickly.  I communicate with a deaf person about once a week but other than that, I don't get a lot of practice.  The more I thought about this challenge, the more nervous I got.  I realized something about my self, I was only comfortable with deaf people on my territory, where hearing people were the majority.  The source of my fears was being the only hearing person in the deaf world.  It took a little while to hammer out the fear because I have been to a deaf event before so why was this causing me to panic?  I went to the deaf expo last summer and was surrounded by thousands of deaf and hard of hearing people.  I didn't have any nerves there, so why would this be any different.  Then it hit me, at the expo I could choose to engage with people or not.  I kept my head down, avoided eye contact or looked at the materials at the booths rather than talk with the vendors.  I could control the contact.  I would choose to communicate only when I wanted to.  This would be different, the whole concept is to meet the deaf community in their setting.  What if they ignored me? What if I couldn't understand?  What if they rolled their eyes and signed "Who invited the hearing girl?"
   Well I went, nervous and practicing in my head what I would sign if approached.  After the initial butterflies in my tummy settled, it was an amazing experience.  A man chatted with me for about an hour and except for new words the he had to finger spell to help me understand, I hung in there with the conversation.  At the end of the night I went back to my car feeling like I had stepped over the edge of my comfort zone and stepped into a new comfort zone.  I would  recommend this type of experience to everyone, if learning a new language is something on your bucket list, I would highly recommend ASL.  The language is beautiful, the deaf community is welcoming of the hearing and patient with those of us still learning.  However the experience of being outside your comfort zone is the real lesson.  Pushing beyond the day to day normalcy and stretching into something new, this will leave you and the "whatever you choose" with a bigger view, a better view of each other and a new understanding of something that had previously remained a mystery.