Job Market is the boxing ring, perhaps with a Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather and maybe add a little of some Mike Tyson in the match.. Finding a job is like entering match! But it doesn’t end there, you gotta win those rounds before winning the match.. And then once you win the match you spends 3 to 6 months recovering and debating if you want to continue or to quit or to get let go.. You loose a little of yourself, kiss a few asses or lose a toe while opening a door, or you get knocked out. But then you get back up, recover from the fight and then go back into it.. Does that sound about right?? Straight forward cycle yeah?
Now lets talk about those deaf/hard of hearing people… For them its more sorta like that movie Cast Away with Tom Hanks (Chuck Noland ).. Well yeah maybe on the extreme side of it.. But I am going to use this as example of what we endure..
Fresh out of college after learning and accepting your identity, to learning and struggling to enhancing your knowledge, to meeting like minded people like themselves. But then everything changes once they leave college; it was like the college was a big thick pillow between gold fish (college) and black piranha(real world). College life was Tom Hank’s life before he crashed, and the helicopter was his pillow that was shatter to a new chapter of his life.
Hearing people struggle to get job, along with the additional waging war dealing with race and gender.. So if you think you guys have it hard. Deaf and hard of hearing people are five steps behind the hearing folks. The struggle and the battle between hearing people and proving to them that you can do it regardless how well their hearing is.
Searching jobs is like a soul crushing career of its’ own. While you watch your hearing counterparts eventually get jobs or do jobs that their ears will allow them to do. Deaf and hard of hearing people continue to fight that multi-battle between keeping their spirits up and continue looking for jobs. And I am not talking about just minimum wage or blue collard jobs. I am talking about having well paid jobs, high profiled careers and fast pace moving jobs. Difficulty comes with bridges of communications and knowledge of working with a deaf/hard of hearing person..
As I recently mentioned the bridges of communications and knowledge. People on earth for the most part are not first handily aware of deafness. One thing that makes deafness so challenging is the fact that it’s a invisible disability and it is more of a psychological factor instead of a physical one. And what I mean by that is that some of deaf people don’t wear hearing aids, some do and other wear cochlear implants.. So people seeing that we were a device would first think its a bluetooth or headphones. So deafness is going to be the last thing that comes to mind.
Deaf and hard of hearing people generally suffer of some degree of judgement rather it can be putting a cochlear implant in a baby ears to taking one’s hearing aids while being punished (form of silent treatment), to refusing to put close caption on ones tv to being told “never mind” or yelling while being communicated to or hard of hearing person to being accused of having selective hearing and the list goes on. But this is for the unrecognized or unaware hearing folks and as for the deaf and hard of hearing this is in-depth familiarity territory.
This is something that deaf and hard of hearing people face starting at birth. By the time we graduate from college we are aware of the subtleness of racism which is something we are educated at a young age.. So when we head out the the real world, we hold fear of rejection because of our hearing loss. We often get judged because of the way we may sound, or how we write, or because we are a mute and or because sign. Many companies are too cheap and too lazy to take the effort to accommodate the deaf and the hard of hearing. Many deaf and hard of hearing people are professional students, they go back to college because they cannot get a job following their original dreams.
Tiphliz's Paradox 