WHAT DO PEOPLE THINK OF ME?
" 'She's ugly. ... They may think it's weird that my hands are moving around in the air. They may think you have a problem because your hands are moving around."When Alanna Laughrey was a little girl, she was afraid to talk in public.Kids would sometimes laugh at her, making cracks about how her mouth twitched and her arms and hands moved in the air to form words.“When I was growing up, I worried about what people thought of me,” she says through American Sign Language interpreter Lori Colwell. “Now, I’ve learned not to care.”Alanna’s parents are also deaf and so is her older sister. And for all of her 16 years, Alanna has lived in the deaf world.She attends the Kansas State School for the Deaf in Olathe, where she’s a junior. She is friends with other teens there, content to be with other deaf people because she’s comfortable and feels accepted. She wants to study writing at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., a school that specializes in educating deaf and hard-of-hearing students.“It’s pretty scary for me in the hearing world, being around hearing people,” says the petite blonde, who wears thin black glasses and loves checkered designs on fabric.In some places, like at Oak Park Mall, she’s the puzzle piece that looks as if it would fit in a spot but doesn’t.“If they say something to me and I don’t answer, they think I’m weird or need help,” she said. At a camp last year for young deaf people, counselors taught her to look past what people think and just be who she is. That’s her focus now.“I’m very happy being deaf,” she says. “I have a different perspective than hearing people do.”The example she uses is how she sees people like her. “If I was a hearing person, I would think differently of deaf people. I would think they are mentally retarded or have other problems,” she says. Being deaf “gives me the perspective of knowing nobody is perfect.”
