Deaf, Disabled, and Fully Human: Emersonian Precepts for Reclaiming Your Humanity

By Sarah Wheeler, M.Ed., M.S.

A Particular Kind of Erasure

There's a particular kind of erasure that settles into the being of anyone who belongs to a marginalized community. You enter a space, and before you communicate anything, people have already categorized you. They've reduced your multifaceted, complex self into a single descriptor. You're the Deaf person. The blind person. The disabled person. The immigrant. The foreigner. You're no longer recognized for who you are. You become your Deafness first, and a person second, if at all.

This erasure looks different from the invisibility interpreters experience, but it's equally dehumanizing. Interpreters disappear because they're trained to make themselves neutral in the communication process. You disappear because the world can't quite see past the fact of your Deafness or disability to notice anything else about you.

The irony is sharp and painful: the very accommodation designed to include you (the interpreter) often reinforces the assumption that you need to be interpreted to be understood. That your identity is limited to what needs to be translated. The most important thing about you is what others need to get from you.

But here's what needs to be true, and what Ralph Waldo Emerson articulated in his 1841 essay Self-Reliance, ideas that have profound relevance for Deaf and disabled people today: You are not your Deafness. You are not your disability. You are not your difference. These are aspects of who you are, powerful and real, but they are not the totality of your humanity.

First Principle: To Break Off Customs

The customs imposed on Deaf people in hearing-dominant spaces are relentless and often invisible. Customs about how you should communicate (preferably in ways that make hearing people comfortable). Customs about what you're "good at" (usually things hearing people think Deaf people should be good at). Customs about your ambitions, your capabilities, your place in the world.

There are customs about how you should respond to your Deafness. Should you be grateful for hearing aids? Should you work toward oral proficiency? Should you learn to "pass"? Should you identify with the Deaf community or assimilate into the hearing world? The hearing world has opinions. Often very strong ones, delivered with the best intentions.

Emerson wrote that society is "a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." For Deaf and disabled people, this conspiracy takes concrete form in the customs that surround our bodies, our communication, our very right to exist on our own terms.

Breaking off these customs means questioning whose rules you're following and why. It means examining which of society's expectations serve your actual life and which ones you've internalized simply because you've been told repeatedly that this is how things should be.

It means asking: Which adaptations have I made because they genuinely serve me? Which ones have I made because I was afraid of being a burden, or difficult, or "too Deaf"?

It means reclaiming the right to be Deaf in whatever way feels authentic to you. Sign fluently or not. Use hearing aids or don't. Identify with Deaf culture or the broader disability community or neither or both. Communicate in whatever modality feels natural to your being.

Your Deafness doesn't belong to society. It belongs to you. The customs around it should serve your life, not constrain it.

Second Principle: To Shake Off Internalized Oppression

Every marginalized community has internalized oppressive narratives circulating through it. The underlying messages that become so familiar you forget they were ever questioned. The philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about how marginalization works through internalization: eventually, you don't need others to police you. You police yourself. You self-censor. You shrink yourself to fit into spaces that were never designed for you.

For Deaf people, some of these internalized narratives come up:

• You're inspiring just for existing. (Translation: I'm surprised you're capable of basic humanity.)

• You should be grateful for accommodation, even when it's inadequate or demeaning.

• Your Deafness is something to overcome, not something that simply is.

• You're expected to be an ambassador for your entire community in every space you occupy.

• You owe hearing people education and patience about your existence.

• The hearing world is the default. You're the deviation.

These narratives are insidious not because they're entirely false, but because they're partial truths corrupted into demands. Yes, you might inspire some people, but not because you deserve a medal for existing. Yes, accommodations matter, but they should be your right, not a gift to be grateful for. Yes, your Deafness is an identity to embrace, but you don't have to educate the world about it.

You don't need a hearing person telling you to be more accommodating, or less Deaf. You've already had it on repeat in your own head.

Shaking off these internalized beliefs means recognizing which beliefs about yourself and your community aren't actually yours. Which judgments you've internalized from people who don't understand your life. Which expectations aren't wisdom but simply the hearing world's discomfort projected onto you.

It means reclaiming the narrative about what it means to be Deaf, to be disabled, to be in a body or mind that the world insists on calling "other."

Third Principle: To Remember and Reclaim Your Authentic Self

Remember before you internalized all the limiting beliefs? There was a moment, maybe brief, maybe lasting, when you were more fully yourself. Before you learned to perform being "the right kind of Deaf person" or "the right kind of disabled person." Before you learned which parts of yourself made hearing people uncomfortable.

Children who are Deaf or disabled have an aliveness that the world works hard to condition out of them. They use their bodies freely. They communicate in whatever way works for them without apology. They assert their needs without performative gratitude. They see their difference as simply part of who they are, not as a tragedy or a problem or an inspiration.

Then the hearing world, usually with good intentions, teaches them to fit in. To minimize. To be grateful. To see themselves through pitying eyes. To accept that the world wasn't built for them and never will be.

Reconnecting with that earlier version of yourself means remembering before the world convinced you that your existence needs justification.

What did you love before you learned to be self-conscious about being Deaf? What did you believe about your capabilities before you heard all the reasons why they wouldn't work? What parts of your Deaf culture, your disability identity, your authentic self did you set aside to make others comfortable?

You're allowed to reclaim those parts. They might be the truest parts of you.

Fourth Principle: To Honor Your Own Genius

Here's the hardest one, because society works overtime to convince marginalized people that their genius, their essential way of being in the world, is something to apologize for or hide.

Your genius isn't about what you produce or achieve or how well you fit into hearing society's structures. Your genius is your specific way of encountering and understanding the world. Your Deaf experience gives you particular gifts, particular ways of seeing and connecting that aren't better or worse than hearing ways, just different. Particular.

Maybe you're a visual thinker. Maybe you move through the world with different spatial awareness. Maybe you've developed a fierce community because you had to create connection outside of hearing structures. Maybe you understand interdependence and accommodation in ways that run deeper than theory. Maybe you navigate the world with a creativity born from constant adaptation.

These aren't compensations for your Deafness. They're not silver linings. They're simply who you are. Your genius.

But society constantly asks you to do violence against your genius. To communicate in ways that don't come naturally. To participate in systems designed for different bodies and minds. To spend your energy translating yourself into hearing-world terms rather than being fully yourself.

Honoring your own genius means refusing that violence. It means creating spaces where you don't have to be anything other than fully, authentically Deaf or disabled or however you identify.

It means recognizing when situations require you to violate your integrity, to pretend to be more hearing, less Deaf, more accommodating, less real, and having the courage to name that as a violation rather than a necessary compromise.

Sometimes the most authentic thing you can do is walk away from situations that require you to erase yourself.

The I-Thou Recognition

Here's what both interpreters and Deaf people need to understand about each other, and what society needs to understand about everyone:

Martin Buber's I-Thou relationship applies to everyone.

When you walk into a medical appointment with an interpreter, you're not just "the Deaf patient." You show up with your own expertise about your body and your experience. You're not an object to be fixed or a problem to be solved. You're a Thou.

Your interpreter isn't a machine or a telephone. They're a person with their own inner life, their own emotional responses to the meaning flowing through them. They're a Thou.

The hearing world that constructed this entire system needs to learn the difference too.

You're not the Deaf community's ambassador. You're a specific person with specific dreams and struggles and joys that have nothing to do with your Deafness and everything to do with being human.

Your interpreter isn't a neutral conduit. They're a human being holding space for connection, and they deserve to arrive home at the end of the day with enough of themselves left to live their own life.

What It Means to Live Unwasted

The measure of an unwasted life isn't how well you conformed to others' expectations. It's not how successfully you performed being the "right kind" of Deaf person or disabled person. It's not how grateful you were or how inspiring you managed to be.

The measure of an unwasted life is whether you remained yourself. Whether you protected your genius and your humanity even when the world asked you to diminish both. Whether you insisted on being seen as a full person, not a category.

Whether you lived fully instead of lived carefully.

Whether you honored yourself as a Thou, not an It.

That's available to you. It's not easy. The world will resist. But it's available.

And here's what might matter most: when Deaf and disabled people live fully as themselves, when interpreters live fully as themselves, when we all insist on mutual recognition of each other's humanity, something shifts. We stop extracting from each other. We start actually meeting.

That's when real connection becomes possible. That's when accommodation becomes genuine. That's when an interpreter can show up as their whole self to meet you as your whole self.

That's the world these principles point toward.

That's what your full humanity demands.

About the Author

Written by Sarah Wheeler, a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults) with lived experience between both Deaf and hearing worlds. This perspective informs the belief that accessibility and authentic representation matter deeply in all communities.

Sources and Philosophical Context

The four principles in this essay draw from Ralph Waldo Emerson's foundational 1841 essay Self-Reliance, which articulates themes of nonconformity, authentic self-expression, and resistance to societal pressures to diminish one's true nature. Emerson's philosophical framework, emphasizing individual authenticity, questioning inherited customs, recognizing internalized societal pressures, reconnecting with one's original nature, and honoring one's unique gifts ,has been adapted here specifically for Deaf and disabled communities.

The concept of internalized oppression draws from Michel Foucault's work on how marginalization operates through internalization, as articulated in Discipline and Punish and related philosophical texts.

The I-Thou framework comes from philosopher Martin Buber's 1923 work I and Thou, which distinguishes between relationships in which people recognize each other's full humanity (I-Thou) versus relationships in which people are treated as objects or means to ends (I-It).