Output.

First, I’m going to share a little story I learned in a math class that led me to the idea of outputting. I remember one of the beautiful things about mathematics was this concept called a function.

One time I was sitting in a math class and the teacher was explaining what does a function mean and that we will start using f(x), not y anymore. He drew this simple picture on the blackboard. It looked somewhat like a bin that you put something into it (input) and something would come out (output). So, the bin is like a function. You insert a number into the “bin” and it undergoes some kind of transformation, actually a function, and a new number comes out. Isn’t that wonderful? It can go backwards too, so you can go either way. I thought that was the most simple thing about mathematics and make the problem appear less complicated. This process concept can be applied to many things, for instance, like ourselves.

We especially as deaf people need to OUTPUT more. It doesn’t matter what that might be. Writing, blogging, vlogging, signing, coding, painting, drawing, publishing papers, building websites, so on. There could never be enough output. It doesn’t do any good if you’re doing nothing or making no output. If you have something to share, tell. Don’t be keeping things to yourself because uh how could other people know? It’s even better if you could put on some kind of medium like papers, blogs, pictures, or vlogs because they are reusable and you don’t have to be telling stories over and over. That’s old. In the past, it costs some money to publish stories. Now? it’s nearly free! Anyone can publish.

It is my prediction that in the next few years, we will possibly see the greatest growth in the deaf community ever. No longer do we have to depend on someone to produce media for us like major newspapers. We can make our own news now. We finally have a way to share ASL vlogs easily and it’s spreading like a wildfire. A person doesn’t have to find a deaf person to learn ASL. S/he can look at ASL videos and learn. It’s a little strange to meet a person who has learned some ASL but never met a single deaf person before! Of course, the best way to learn is to hang out with deaf people. The more people learn ASL, the better it will be for us. They will be more likely to support us and respect us as a linguistic culture. They will seek ways to help improve education for deaf kids, bring better accessibility and build more technology.

The only way for people to know more about us is by outputting. Go write something, make vlogs, arts, publish research papers, anything. That is how we advance as a society.