Black Deaf Culture Through the Lens of History (BASL and ASL-centric)

Understanding Deaf Culture by Paddy Ladd (which can also be found on archive.org)

Many Ways to Be Deaf: International Variation in Deaf Communities

the British Deaf Association website

directory for Deaf Australia’s “Our Deaf Ways” video podcast (presented in Auslan with audio from an interpreter and accurate closed captioning for all episodes)

The Irish Deaf Community by Patrick A. Matthews

Breaking the Silence: The Education of the Deaf in Ireland, 1816-1996

the Canadian Deaf Culture Center website

History of Hawai'i Sign Language and Hawai'i Deaf People by Barbara Earth, with Linda Lambrecht

But the answer, it turns out, is I was doing something. Riding in a car jars your body in many directions and requires constant microadjustments of your muscles just to stay in place and hold your normal posture. Because you're inside the car, inside the situation, it's easy not to notice all the extra work you're doing just to maintain the status quo.

There's all sorts of type of work that we think of as "free" that require spending energy: concentrating, making decisions, managing anxiety, maintaining hypervigilance in an unfriendly environment, dealing with stereotype threat, processing a lot of sensory input, repairing skin cells damaged sun exposure, trying to stay warm in a cold room.

What I wish I’d been told is that good people will think it's awesome that you enforce your boundaries, that there are people who will respect the hell out of you for it, that there are people who will admire you not despite you telling them no, but because of it. That most people don’t want to make you do something you don’t enjoy,and so they’ll actively be happier and more relaxed around you if they know they can trust you to decline to do things you don’t enjoy and to ask them to stop things that bother you.

It helped me a lot, personally, to stop thinking of ‘enforcing my boundaries’ as something I did for me and more as something I did to empower the people I was close with, to build a situation where they and I felt sure everything that was going on was something we all wanted.

What humans see:

What Vulcans see:

i am people. i am good

The few big n’ tall characters that are intended to be attractive and likeable tend to be non-human and bulk muscle, not fat, with minimal hair.

And that really... did a number on his self-esteem, because he had such a hard time believing that I could be attracted to him, with all of his weight and natural hair growth, because he would see me interested in characters that looked much more like me than him.

I know this guy who is literally married and he still brings up to his partner that he should lose weight for them and his partner has to remind him all the time that he is loved no matter what his body image tells him and that he should only try losing weight if he wants to. Not for anyone else except his own self.

*cooking meals* this doesn’t feel better

*exercising* this doesn’t feel better

*making art* this doesn’t feel better

*cleaning the apartment* this doesn’t feel better

*somewhere months or years down the line*