My first semester of college is coming to an end, and I am feeling anxious. I do not know why. Being in the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising and following my major as a fashion designer has been my dream. Ever since I was a little boy left on my own without my mother paying attention, I loved television shows. I liked cartoons and kids’ shows. One day, I was bored and just wanted to watch something different. I flipped through the channels until I found a live fashion show. With the first design of lace-up cutouts, I was mesmerized. Watching each model on the stage and showing off various outfits such as chokers, camas, mid-length floral dresses, and so many more, it was like something inside me just came out bursting. I knew then what I wanted to become. When I first told my mother, she just scoffed and laughed. She said it did not “suit me” because I came from an Indian family and I am a man. I should be focused on being a lawyer, a doctor, or even a mathematician for prosperity as that is how to support myself and a family of my own. “This won’t make any money!”
It didn’t stop me from continuing to find ways to learn about fashion. I remember I would hide fashion magazines that I bought from a local convenience store and hide them under my bed. When the internet became more popular by the time I was in middle school, I would spend hours browsing fashion shows, news, and activities that were happening. I even secretly pretend to host fashion shows and cut out dresses from the magazines from the toys or figures that my mom gave me that are “suitable” for boys, but that I never liked and would pretend those figures are beautiful models and taped those dresses on them. I would always be hosting, making those figures walk down from one end of the table to another, and imagining a huge audience beaming down. It was my dream to host a fashion business and hoped that it would one day become a part of a fashion show, maybe more. There were a few times that my mother went into my room when I am at school to do some cleaning and found my secret box under my bed, in the closet, and even in the drawers. She would give me whippings with her hard wooden spoons when I get home and screamed at me. Even if she destroyed my work, I still try to sneak in more magazines and build up a collection in another box hidden elsewhere in my room where I did not think my mom could find it. She gave up when I was a teenager.
Growing up as an Indian boy till now at college, I was isolated, ashamed, and didn’t have any friends because I felt like I had to fake it to make it. By the time I graduated from high school and was on my own, I had no support. My own single mother did not accept me completely as who I am, especially when I came out to her in my sophomore year. I expressed a crush on this boy who was in his junior year. I never felt this way before, and I was extremely shy. Stupidly, I came up to my mother that I believe I liked boys and that I need her advice on how to approach them. She was enraged that I told her something that “IS NOT TRUE! You like women! You were just trying to hurt me!” and that it cannot happen because I am a man and that “I needed to get rid of the disgusting, demonic feelings because I deserved a nice wife to take extra care of me”. I knew my mother said the word extra as to indirectly take a dab at my hearing loss. Another one to add to her long list of disappointments in me. I kept my homosexuality to myself and never tried dating. Yet, my mother heard about school events such as homecomings, dance events, and proms, and always asked me why I haven’t found a sweet girl by then. My father was not in the picture. He left when I became hard of hearing when they found out when I was three years old due to a severe ear infection. Last I heard, he had a brand-new family in Texas or somewhere in the Midwest. I do not know much about my culture because my mother was busy trying to find out how to cure my hearing. She easily gets frustrated when there were so many times that I did not understand what she was telling me and she stormed off to another room after I keep asking her to slow down and repeat what she was saying. Since my father left, she lost what little motivation she had to continue the traditions.
My grandmother came after a few months since my father left. It was difficult to understand her because she spoke in Hindu. I can understand a few words here and there, but it was simple commands such as baithana for “sit”, kha for “eat”, madad for “help”. She would sometimes gesture to me about what she would need help with. She encouraged my mother and me to go to India, to her churches, and to any of her events, but my mother wouldn’t budge. She even forbids me to go because I couldn’t understand what would be going on. She and my mother always spoke in Hindu, and when I ask my mom for translation, she looked annoyed. and keep telling me it was nothing that I need to be concerned about. I never knew my grandmother the way I wished I did. She was a nice woman who treated me well, but unfortunately, my mother was bitter even toward her.
Fortunately, I was forced to study hard and got several scholarships to help pay for my first year, but that was it. I told myself that if I had to get loans to pay for the rest of my college years, so be it.
Fashion, for me, was more than just clothing or design. Each of us has our own preference of clothing we would like to wear. Preppy, popular, nerd, goth, classy, and so on – fashion describes the person and how they feel, what they would like to express about themselves and to put what was inside in our own souls onto our skins. Growing up, I was poor, and I did not like the clothes that my mom gave me. It was too big, too small, too ugly, too loud, too quiet, all those things that didn’t let me express myself. I never really got to express myself and no one really understood me. I got a part-time job right when I was old enough because I wanted to buy my own clothes. There were times when I had to hide my clothes because of my mother. The first time when I got home, I tried to show my clothes to my mother when laying them out. She took one look and let out a loud sigh. Her face showed disgust. She grabbed every outfit I bought, went outside in front of our garage, and brought a kitchen lighter to burn them in the trash can. I was pleading with her not to do that. “It was my money! You have no right to take things that do not belong to you!” I was begging on my knees, sobbing. She just looked at me coldly, angry, and yelled, “WHY CAN’T YOU WEAR THE CLOTHES I GOT YOU?!?! You should be grateful for how much I worked and sacrificed for you, and this is the thanks I get? YOU WILL NEVER BE A FASHION DESIGNER! Grow up!” Since then, I have been secretly changing clothes at school in the bathroom right away when I arrived at school.
Now I am in college, and I made it out of that toxic environment, I am free! Then why do I feel so uneasy being here? Perhaps it was because it was even more difficult to keep up the pace with what was going on around me. Growing up, I had hearing aids on and knew I could speak, but my speech skills were not to the level of my peers. My mother forced me to take intensive speech therapy. It was torturous because I was criticized so often. I was forced to touch my speech therapists’ throat where their voice box was, to “learn how to speak properly the way they do.” Through many hours of repetition with the consonant sounds that I mispronounced such as “l”, “r”, and all of those sounds where I would have to roll up or down my tongue to hit the tone just right, I finally mastered it. Even tried to work hard studying the lips of my classmates, the teacher, and the people around me and training myself to see if I could understand them after so many years of trials and failures, so it should not have been a problem. Yet, I was having a hard time understanding the people around me as things were hectic on campus. People were chattering about the next exciting fashion design. Perhaps it had to do with having awkward social skills. The years of coming home and sitting in my room to watch television or read books, because I had no friends. I did not even have a birthday party at home ever. I thought it was a school thing until in high school, a student invited me to their house, and finding out it was a birthday party that their parents made for them shook me up. I felt like an outcast. Even here at college, I felt even more embarrassed being myself. I was a quiet person with a lot to say. Yet, the years of being criticized made me fear that the colleagues around me would be like my mother. So, I did not say anything and just tried to absorb whatever was around me. But even that was lacking.
My only relief was when I made a friend with my roommate. I found an affordable apartment with this girl I met online. Her name was Gigi, a Caucasian, about a year older than me. She had brunette hair, and blue eyes, and was overweight. She attended the same school. She was not well-liked. After living with her for a couple of months, whenever I came home, we talked about our days. She did not really talk much about herself, though. She gossiped about a lot of her peers. She was negative, pointing out their flaws. No wonder no one came to our apartment and when I saw her on campus, she was often alone. She had a book that she wrote in it. I suspected though that she was jotting down what she heard about people around her. I liked her for two reasons. The first reason was that she asked me questions about my life. She wanted to know what was going on with my day; what happened; and what my life was like growing up with my family from a small town in Nevada. She even asked how I was feeling. I shrugged it off that I was fine, but she looked me seriously right in the eyes and asked again, “No, don’t shrug it off. How are you really feeling?” I was taken aback. No one asked me that my whole life. Slowly, I started opening up to her. I trusted her more than my own mother even if I did not express everything about myself. The second reason was that she never complained about me. She never criticized me. She even accepted me for being gay and all. For the first time, I felt accepted and right at home.
One night, I had an uncanny dream. I was in some sort of dungeon, except everything was painted green. Green walls, green books, green clothes, everything was green. It felt like a jail because I felt stuck, trapped. There was a window at the end of the room from the door, and it was a bleak day. Cloudy. I looked around and I saw Gigi. She was on the bed on the left side of the door where I was facing. I came up to her and asked if she was okay. She looked at me with a grin and then started vomiting. I touched her back to try to calm her down, but her vomiting wouldn’t stop. It just kept going. It was constant and soon the floor flooded with her vomit. However, the door was shut. I couldn’t get out. Gigi would smile and laugh then vomit. It was back and forth. The way she laughed sent goosebumps down my skin. I could even feel my skin hair fire up. I panicked. And the panic attack got worse every time she paused to laugh after vomiting. I tried to open the door and I looked down – the vomit was flooding the room and it was going up to my waist, up to my chest, then to my neck. I yelled at Gigi to stop and that we would die if she didn’t stop. But she didn’t hear me. She was drowning in her own vomit, but even if she was long gone, the vomiting was piling up in the room. I looked up to scream for help, but no one answered. Not even when her vomit was swallowing up in my mouth. I woke up, panicked. I was breathing hard. It was too early in the morning before class. I went to the kitchen to get some water. I looked around and something still didn’t feel right in the apartment. I had to get out of there. I got ready for my class, which would not start for a few hours, by changing into my clothes, grabbing my laptop in my bag, the textbooks I needed for the day, and then I walked out.
What to do for a few hours before my class started at 11? I wasn’t sure. I decided to take public transportation to Starbucks near the campus. I forgot to take some leisure books and I did not feel like studying so I thought maybe I could browse the internet for the latest fashion news until then. When I arrived, I was waiting patiently in line thinking about the dream. It felt so vivid, so surreal. Why did I dream about that with my roommate? Why was she laughing? It should just be a dream? Right? Then someone behind me tapped my shoulder. I looked around and realized it was my turn to order. I got distracted and then spoke out my order of “Café Mocha, two sugar, one whipped cream, and a croissant.” I gave my name, “Sadal, could you please wave at me when it is my turn because I am hard of hearing?” Then just as I was at the pick-up line waiting for them to call me, I saw the same person who tapped me holding out her phone to the barista. The barista noticed and pulled out a piece of paper from the receipt paper machine and wrote it to her. The same person, a young Hispanic woman, a few years older, then gestured something by putting her right hand to her chin and moving it away from her downward. She walked and stood next to wait for her order. She had long black curly hair and brown eyes. I saw that she had a hearing aid on her left ear. I thought, ‘she must be hard of hearing, or maybe she is deaf?’
The barista waved at me. I looked around and grabbed my order. I sat down. I couldn’t help but think about how simple it was that the woman used her phone. And that gesture she did must have been sign language. I never knew sign language. My mom wouldn’t let me. She believed that deaf people were not smart or independent and she vowed that I would never be like them. I grew up in a mainstream school, but I never had an interpreter while I watched other deaf and hard-of-hearing children with interpreters, learning sign language, laughing, and playing with each other. I grew up with teachers that wore microphones at one point that were connected to my hearing aids, like an old-fashioned Bluetooth device type. Then I had an upgrade to my cochlear implant and no longer needed my teacher because I could hear them pretty well. In the beginning, I felt sorry for those children who did not have the abilities that I had. But after a few years watching them in their program, I wondered if my mother made a mistake.
Sitting down and browsing the internet while eating my first breakfast, I couldn’t help but look back to this woman. She sat down in a seat near the window, reading a textbook. She may have been a student. I wondered if those students in my teenage years ever succeeded in making something of themselves. I wanted to ask her. I opened the Notes app on my iPhone and typed. I rewrote the first couple of sentences several times. But finally, I decided to write, “Hey, my name is Sadal. I am hard of hearing. I saw that you were deaf. I was wondering if I can ask you questions about your experiences? Sorry to intrude!” I mustered up the courage to go to her table and showed her my phone. She didn’t look up for a couple of minutes. I felt embarrassed standing near her table waiting for her to look up. I did not want to say hi just yet because I did not want to interrupt whatever she was reading. When it felt too long, I then felt stupid and decided to put my phone away until there was a wave in the corner of my eye. I looked up. She looked up at me quizzingly. I handed her my phone with the note app open. She looked at it and smiled. She gestured something and pointed to the chair in front of her. I sat down. She went into her backpack and handed out a notebook. She started writing something there and slid it over the table to me. It read, “What would you like to know? =)”
I asked questions about her. I learned that her name was Candice. She grew up in a deaf family and had two other deaf siblings – an older sister and a younger brother. During the first half of her school years, she was in a mainstream school with an interpreter. Her first language was Spanish and sign language, but she admitted she did not really understand Spanish until she learned sign language. In school, she learned English later. She had many deaf and hard-of-hearing peers in the same environment. When she was in high school, she was given a choice by her parents to attend a deaf school or continue in a mainstream environment. She chose to attend Riverside School for the Deaf. She wrote “That was the place where I learned there is more to deaf people than meets the eye. There were great teachers that helped students to be inspired, to have role models to become anything they wanted. There were deaf people that wanted to be artists, writers, actors, lawyers, teachers, and all kinds of professions. That school helped me believe that being deaf or hard of hearing is not a handicap. It doesn’t prevent us from doing things as people assume it does. In fact, being deaf is a strength!” She said after high school, she is now attending California State University Northridge studying to become a teacher someday, and is a senior going to graduate by May.
She asked me about myself. I was hesitant to share. Besides Gigi, no one else had ever asked about my life. I shrugged it off and wrote, “It is boring. Not as interesting as yours.” She looked at me and voiced, “I know that you speak well. What is that like?”
I was shocked! “You can voice?”
She laughed and wrote down, “My parents were hearing and preferred to communicate with us in Spanish so yes, I can voice. The difference is I can choose not to voice. What about your life?”
I did not explain my experiences like the clothing or being gay and lonely. However, I did write, “I grew up oral with hearing aids. I had speech therapy for years and learned to lipread. I felt that it helped. Or so I thought when I came to school, and everything was just…loud, fast, and I feel like I had to catch up more than I thought. I did not have a great childhood or that kind of supportive family. That was why after high school, I decided to do what I wanted to do anyway as a future fashion designer. It is my sanctuary, you know?”
She nodded and asked where I was going to college and if I was interested in learning sign language. I told her where I was going and that I think it was too late for me to learn sign language. She told me “It is never too late to learn sign language. CSUN offers ASL classes if you are interested. And if you do not like your college, you could always transfer. Maybe with the deaf community, you could feel more yourself? Just putting it out there =)”. She looked at her phone and gasped. She wrote something and tore it out from her notebook. She handed it to me and smiled. She left. The note said, “Sorry, I must go. It was good talking to you. Here is my phone number 8184359877. Text me if you want!”
I got up and back to where I was sitting before. I went into my Chrome browser and googled “California State University, Northridge”. I saw the many programs they offered there. I saw that they had a center called National Center on Deafness. I saw that there is a major called Deaf Studies. I was surprised and did not realize that it was a degree. I learned that people with that major can go on to become interpreters, community service, teachers, professors, and so on. They even offered my major to their department of Family and Consumer Sciences of Apparel Design and Merchandising. Looking at that website and seeing their pictures on their social media, something in me brightened up. I felt more relaxed, more at home. That similar feeling, I got when being roommates with Gigi.
Yet, when thinking about Gigi right now, I got a sickening feeling, almost as if I would be throwing up myself. I composed myself before looking at the pictures on social media. I was drawn and it eased nausea. I looked at the time and realized it was time to return to campus for my class. I had been researching for longer than I thought.
After class ended, I decided to go off campus somewhere for a quick lunch and come back. I was just passing by a library and there was a courtyard outside. I was looking around for a seat to look on my phone for any off-campus restaurants. I heard a familiar voice reverberating through my hearing aids. I looked up and saw a table where Gigi was surrounded by other people, laughing. Gigi was going on complaining. I wanted to approach her but thought better of it. I knew I didn’t do well in groups. I looked at her lips to lip read and I turned white. I got the words, “…Sadal…never…. birthday parties….believe it? Ridiculous!” I couldn’t believe what she was saying. I hid behind a tree. She was expressing to people about me! Really? Not her! That was personal! No way! I looked again and saw her saying, “worked…clothing…bought…so sad that…burn…clothes!” and started laughing. I looked at the others’ faces. Some were surprised. Some had a kind of pitiful face. But most of them were laughing!
I ran out of sight. I just kept running and running. Then suddenly, I was feeling nauseous. I went to the nearest bathroom and puked in the toilet. Blegh, blegh, belgh! I vomited. Blegh blegh, blegh! I vomited until there was nothing left.
I decided to go home. I did not go to the rest of the classes. I did not eat. I just went on a public bus and went home. I laid down on my bed when I got home, sobbing, crying, and contemplating.
I trusted Gigi! Why did she do that? I knew she complained about everyone else, but I never thought she would complain about me. I thought maybe she liked me enough not to complain. I feel sick when I think about her now. Then I remembered the dream earlier. She was puking in front of me in the dream and the vomit drowned me. And I was puking earlier. That cannot be a coincidence. Somewhere back in my mind, I knew Gig was not good for me at all. She was only nice to me so that she could have something about me to complain to people about. She was never good at keeping secrets. Why should I be the exception? I looked around in my room and somehow, this home felt so strangely familiar. The walls were bleak, the light shining at the one window was dimmer and did not shine the whole room. The door was shut tight, and the corners seemed dark. It reminded me of the time I was isolated in my room, never going out of my room because I was afraid of more criticism from my mother. I never went out of my house because I never had friends and I never knew how to make friends. I was trapped. Almost like a dungeon. Almost like a prison! I thought. That was exactly how I felt in my dream!
I got up and sat on my bed. I did not know what to think. I wasn’t safe here, just as I wasn’t safe at home. I wanted to get out of here, but I couldn’t go back home. I would be trading one place where I felt stuck for another where I also felt stuck. Like a prison transfer. Gigi was not good for me. I did not have any other friends at school. While I always had kept up with my studies, this college was harder, and I was falling behind. I didn’t know what to do. Perhaps this was the wrong apartment for me to be in? I remembered that I signed a month-to-month lease. Maybe I could move out by the end of this semester. That felt like a good first step, but what next?
Then I remembered the coffee place and meeting Candice. She went to California State University, Northridge… I remember the research on that school, and I remember having a good feeling. I wondered. Should I transfer? Would transferring to that school be better for me? I think back to my school experiences. I wasn’t learning. Not really. I was only trying to memorize what I need to do to show them what they wanted all my life from teachers. College is a different territory. What was working for me before was no longer working for me. Maybe through sign language? An interpreter? My mother disagreed with me learning because of her perspective of what she thought about deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Maybe that was never true. Maybe it was my mom being ignorant. And in turn, I was ignorant. No more! I thought. Would sign language help me the way that oralism didn’t? It did for Candice.
There was only one way to find out. I grabbed the paper out of my pocket that she gave me with her phone number. I got out my iPhone and wrote a text:
Hey Candice, this is Sadal. How was your day? I was wondering if I can talk to you about something?
I started panicking. Is this a good decision? Would Candice be a good person that I can trust? I took a deep breath. Breathe in, breathe out! I thought. I kept doing this breathing exercise I learned on the first day of orientation; it always helped my anxiety. Breathe in, breathe out! Then it hit me. Even though my mother may be horrible, I did not have a good upbringing, and my first real friend was not really my friend, they did teach me what not to do. How I can avoid being that kind of person. I thought that maybe Candice might be that friend that can teach me what kind of person I can be or at least the first step I need to find those kinds of friends that I need.
I clicked SEND.
Breathe in, breathe out
After a few minutes of the breathing exercise, I felt a vibration on my phone. I got startled and looked at the text.
Hey Sadal, my day is productive and good. How was yours? What’s up? What do you need? ☺”
Maybe I can get out of this dungeon after all. Maybe all it takes is one kind person. I started typing, not knowing what might come next. But for the first time, I think I am going to be okay on my own. Without my toxic mother and without Gigi. She and Gigi taught me what kind of people not to look for. Maybe Candice can teach me what kind of people to look for.
Maybe this is what it feels like to be hopeful.
Justis' MultiStories 