"An Untitled Journey" Chapter One

"An Untitled Journey"

Chapter One

I have always wanted to write a book but to be honest I never knew what I would write about or even whether people would read it. Then today an idea struck me. What if I started to write this just for the soul purpose of enjoying it. What if I began writing simply to see where my thoughts take me and in so doing perhaps the book would effortlessly write itself?

With this in mind let us begin on this journey together shall we? Okay.

Both my grandmother and great grandmother were both deaf and as a young child I always had the desire to communicate with them. That's why when it came time to decide what I wanted to do after graduating from high school majoring in Sign Language Interpretation seemed like the logical fit. Of course, that's not what I wanted to do in the beginning....

Allow me to explain, I come from a very musical family. Both my father and eldest brother played guitar and were gracious enough to teach me how to play at a very young age I even had the chance to write and perform a song with my father which is one of the proudest accomplishments of my life and I am very grateful to have had that experience with him which is why after graduating from high school I wanted to go to school for music.

However, the colleges in the local area only had majors in music education and since my heart was into the performance aspect of the art form and not the teaching of music, that made that decision easy for me. It was only after that that I remembered being in eighth grade learning sign language from an interpreter who had been working with a deaf student in our class. 

Every day at recess I would see them communicating to each other through sign and so one day I mustered up enough courage to ask the interpreter what they were doing. She intern was kind enough to teach me a few signs and thus my fascination, passion and love for sign language began.

I never thought that that moment would be the catalyst towards helping me decide the path I would take in my professional life. I remember thinking this when I walked into meet my college professor for the first time. It hadn't dawned on me at the time that he would be Deaf. That's why it came as quite a shock when he started to move his hands in such a way that I had never seen before up until this point. 

I had no knowledge of ASL at this point and found it hard to understand what he was trying to communicate to me. By the look on his face, I could see he was frustrated while looking around for an interpreter to help him speak with me. As I walked back to my car after the meeting had concluded, I knew that the sooner I began learning ASL the better.

I'll tell you more about that later....have a great day!

Happy Signing!