Deaf Ward

Written August 12, 2022 submitted to a zine about disabled peoples.

CW: RELIGIOUS TRAUMA, SUICIDAL IDEATION

I used to be part of a group, a group I felt safe in. It felt like a family. I thought it was a church but it wasn’t.

When I was growing up, I was very different from the kids in the heart of Mormon country. I am autistic and have suffered from depression and panic disorder my whole life. I would often throw up at church events and camp outs with my youth group because of panic attacks. The other kids and many adults made fun of me constantly about this, poking fun whenever they could. 

Along with my own medical struggles, I come from a family of disability; my dad first had a hip replacement due to arthritis and cancer when I was growing up. My whole family is textbook neurodivergent, and my youngest two sisters were born deaf, requiring cochlear implants. We never seemed to be accepted, and we never got the emotional or spiritual support we were promised from our church. 

Now, while most LDS congregations called wards are organized geographically, there is one Deaf Ward (I know it sounds bleak) composed of the deaf and hard of hearing Mormon families living in and around Provo, Utah. When I was 15, my family stopped going to our local ward and started driving an hour to go to the Deaf Ward. Most of the youth were CODAs (Children of Deaf Adults), though we did have deaf youth in our groups. We all always signed and I strengthened my ASL and was able to communicate with this community. Everyone was so much kinder to me in this congregation.  People didn’t judge me for being strange or sick. Everyone in the whole congregation had to deal with disability in their day to day life and because of that everyone treated each other with so much more empathy. It felt much closer to what I thought Jesus meant when he said “Love thy neighbor”. I loved the deaf ward and when I was 18 I applied to be an Mormon missionary to spread the love I felt.

As it turns out, Mormon missions are not about spreading the love of God and neighbor. I worked 80-90 hours a week as a glorified door to door salesman for two years. We were taught to manipulate and were shamed for not meeting numerical goals. I was punished for being myself at every turn and because I was able to act with an ounce of compassion I was often put in charge of taking care of other seriously mentally ill missionaries. This was a job I was neither supported in nor properly trained to do. There was so much abuse. My first mission companion told me to kill myself every day for weeks. By the end of the two years of labor, I was broken. When I came home I had no light behind my eyes. I was hollow, brainwashed and had severe PTSD. 

I kept having panic attacks and my depression got worse. Members are asked to give the sermons in the LDS church and I once said at the pulpit I believed it was OK to be depressed, to have doubts and to rely on the faith of others. The next person who spoke after me mocked me for my lack of faith and my lack of gumption. 

Things were bad; I considered suicide like that mission companion had suggested. I was stuck in a religiously forced, and extremely unhappy marriage and I felt no support from my church or God. After finding no answers, I decided to step back from religion for a minute and figure out some other form of faith that helped me feel a sliver of the joy I used to experience.

After getting out of the church my eyes were cleared and I ran as fast and hard away from the toxic, manipulative, contrived church as I could. I got a divorce, got on medication and sought out a new community. More and more, as I became friends with other disabled people I discovered it wasn’t the faith I shared with the people in the deaf ward but the shared experience of disability that made us a community.

When you experience a disability there are things you can’t do by yourself and you need to recognize a need for help. I am in a period of my life where my panic attacks and PTSD are incredibly intense. I have had to quit several jobs in a row because of sensory issues, panic attacks and dissociative episodes and I require a lot of help and understanding from friends and family. Even though this is hard, I’ve felt supported by my community, and I’ve been able to return the support to my other friends with physical and mental disabilities. 

What I wish able bodied people would realize is that they need help. No one is an island and we all require other people to help us do the things that we aren’t able to. What would be considered a disability if accommodations that now seem invisible weren’t made? What if there were no glasses, hearing aids, elevators or closed captions? How many people who are on the edge of what is considered disabled would suffer without these things? Taking it a step further, most people in my area need a car to get anywhere. Lots of people rely on ride sharing apps to commute. The more you look the more you see we can’t survive without each other. How many of us could grow our own food? Build our own shelter? I wish people would be able to have some empathy for their communities without having to go through serious medical trauma, especially here in the United States. What if we made sure our neighbors' needs were met without the need for religion? What if we were all one big disabled community? Would we then just be a community?