Not Teasing, But Cruelty
I was not that athletic, but not much worse than other students. In gym class, I was always picked last or not at all (sound common? It has even been written about in Ann Landers' columns). I remember one such gym class rather fondly. We were playing a game that involved throwing a ball over a net and catching it. If you dropped the ball you were out of the game. No one picked me (possibly because of my deafness), and the teacher did nothing about it. Angry, I marched over to one team and joined them. They did not dare to object. The game started and I began to play - and kept playing until I was the only one left! Without realizing it, I had won the game. It made no difference though - I was still not picked for teams after that.
Teasing or Bullying Experience Common
I was not the only deaf/hard of hearing person in my area to suffer from teasing. Stories like mine are all too common among deaf/hoh people in my generation. Others actually had it worse. One boy in junior high/early high school was beaten up so badly by the hearing teenage boys that he had to be hospitalized.
Teasing Has Serious Effects
How did all that teasing affect me as a deaf girl? It had a PROFOUND effect. Even though some of my friends in high school were hearing, I became filled with hatred for hearing people. I was not aware of how deep that hatred was until my first year of college, when one day I kicked over a garbage can in the student lounge. The resident advisor took me aside to ask, "Why do you hate hearing people?" That "woke" me to the truth of how much I was hurting, and I began working on overcoming my hatred. It took me four years to learn to stop feeling so angry towards hearing people.
I also had dreams and fantasies of "getting even." In my fantasies, the kids who were mean would apologize to me publicly. In one dream, I took chalk and wrote obscenities all over the high school parking lot blacktop. Thank goodness it was the 1970s and not the 1990s, or who knows what I, then an angry, hurt deaf teen suffering from the teasing and bullying, could have done!
