Introducing Amanda: The Person Behind Amanda Listens
Introducing Amanda: The person behind Amanda Listens (navy background with image of Amanda behind a gradient arc on the right. Title on a white rectangle off center with three swiggly lines above from the left side).
Hello there!Let me introduce myself. My name is Amanda and this is a space that I created to share my thoughts, concerns, dreams, and aspirations through written and visual content. You must be thinking why this is named “Amanda Listens” when my intention is visual content.
Well, I am deaf (and disabled).
How do I experience the world?
I experience listening differently than what the hearing world views it as. Listening is active (and more so in my life) which aligns with my approach to taking initiative to learning and exploring the endless ways to approach challenges in our society. It only seems right to name this Amanda Listens.
I have been deaf my entire life so silence is my comfort zone. I do have some concept of “hearing” as I was given a hearing aid at one year old and a cochlear implant at seven years old. I am profound-severely deaf so while my hearing devices are useful, it takes an insane amount of energy to “hear,” which means I am listening, All. The. Time.
I am slowly trying to set more boundaries on my accessibility needs as I do speech-read (lip-read) which is not accurate. As I only had the opportunity to learn American Sign Language (ASL) at 14 years old, speech-reading is still automatic to me. It makes it easier for hearing people to communicate with me, but puts immense pressure on me to understand.
It doesn’t help that I am also disabled due to my lovely chronic pain problems. Boundaries are becoming increasingly crucial to my ability to have energy so I have been taking baby steps on the boundaries.
… it is a work in progress.
Why is this important?
Being deaf and disabled, I am always asking “why?” every time I interact with attitudes, institutions, and policies. It is the biggest reason why I did Public Policy Studies as my undergraduate degree, to figure out why these exist.
I am still asking “why?” everywhere I go but I have now included how to be able to effectively contribute to issues and solutions that exist.
As my advocacy journey has been connected with nonprofits. Amanda Listens is an additional route to contributing to change and I hope you can learn along the way with me.
I am an introvert so doing this is a big step for me (even though I am a confident queen when doing this for others). If you are curious about what I talk about, feel free to check out my blogs where I will share my thoughts, concerns, dreams and aspirations, maybe what I am up to.
Amanda