As a young Deaf person often operating in hearing spaces, I often looked for something that might make me look just cool enough to be on equal footing with my abled peers. I fully recognize the internalized ableism in that mindset, but at the time it felt like the only logical way to look at the world. So what did I do? I grew a soul patch. Not only did I grow one, but I kept it in its place below my lips and above my chin an embarrassing amount of time. I never said it out loud, but you bet I internalized conversations where people asked me about it and I would, with a slight drag and puff of a conveniently-available cigarette, say, “Because I got soul”. Let’s just say there have been many people in history – both real (Creed guitarist Mark Tremonti) and fictional (Dean McCoppin from The Iron Giant) – who have pulled it off wondrously, and that list does not include me. And I’m okay with that. We’ve all made mistakes.
But I did another thing I hoped would bring me up a level to my hearing peers: I took great delight in puns. Rare was the passing moment I did not have a pun to throw out. Where most people kept their brain wheels spinning for important shit, I kept them burning smoke in an ongoing search for the next great pun. I felt like a slot machine, every understood comment from a hearing person a yank at the wheel, with all the possible words of the dictionary furiously running in a large, never-ending circle. And each time, I’d keep waiting for the punch line that would never quite come, the “Wow, for a Deaf guy, you’ve got some unheard-of puns.” I even remember developing a script idea involving a kid who came up with the most elaborate, yet dead-on puns, the kind that dialed up the level of difficulty beyond what anyone imagined possible. But it became a house of cards collapsing under the weight of exhaustion. It’s not as cool when people can see you sweating.
And so here, in this third paragraph, is where it all comes together: the soul patch. The questionable facial hair choice meets the exhausting wordplay, a chance to rewrite the narrative of the past into something far simpler. There, you will find the patches of things that have rescued my soul in peaks and valleys, rainouts and droughts. They made walking feel not only possible, but comfortable. They made me always feel like I was on even ground.
