I’ve passed two tests and gotten great marks. I’ve found my favorite weekly session to attend out of several possible time slots. As a class, we have loosened up and are having a grand time, laughing and making sign language bloopers while we study and practice together. I particularly enjoy improvisation to take the lesson that much farther. So far so good. All expected outcomes within normal parameters of a learning environment.

However there has been a quite unexpected outcome so surprising that I’d like to share it with you. Learning ASL has been quite a boost for my emotional health.

It had to have been one of our very first classes when the teacher corrected one of our mistakes and in the process taught us the sign for “wrong” or “incorrect.” Visit the ASL pro visual dictionary and search for wrong to get a sense of the sign.

Signing ASL with your hands but without corresponding facial expressions is incorrect. Imagine the difference in your voice as you tell someone about your day going just ok versus your day going absolutely swimmingly and everything happening just as you’d hoped and better. The inflection and volume of your voice on your words in those two different statements corresponds in ASL to the “volume” of your facial expressions.

Getting back to the example of the sign for “wrong,” you can imagine that it carries an unpleasant facial expression to go with the manual sign. I was the first to comment but we were all thinking it. I told the teacher in my best stuttering sign and alot of finger-spelling that it looks like you are being mean and/or are angry at us when you use that sign. No, no the teacher insisted. Wrong is just wrong, there is no anger or meanness.

Immediately I thought… isn’t that the most emotionally mature thing I’ve heard in a long while. It really is. No emotional wounds need cleansing out with peroxide or ignoring for the time being. It is what it is and you aren’t a bad person because you made a mistake. This is the way to do it right, there ya go, good for you.

That is just unspeakably clear-cut clarity. I LOVE it.

So the time for our second “test” came around and we learned that it would be a presentation that we stood up in front of the class to give rather than a pen and paper sort. And I have this terrible stage fright. I perform better at my job and most things when I’m on my own. The anxiety of living up to someone else’s expectations and worrying about their judgment of me causes me to question my every move and thereby stumble much more often. I was not excited about standing up in front of everyone.

But then I remembered this simple lesson. I am me and so is my signing. Without bragging, I am a good signer — probably due to having a deaf partner at work everyday and being forced – though happily – out of need and compassion to learn how to communicate.

I decided. I had to decide to simply be who I am. And I am not right and I am not wrong. I signed my way through with shaky knees but tried to leave all – my own and the ones i imagine from others – judgments alone. I did well. And I’ve remembered this lesson alot lately. Especially when someone thought they were funny and assigned me a PSW student to follow me around all day.

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