change

I have been saying I don't know who I am. I don't mean in the conventional ways--I'm happy with my husband, my kids, my job, my church, and the area I live in. And yet as I heal my inner pain I also feel I am losing an anchor. I finally found an analogy that I hope makes clear what I am feeling. Imagine a person who went deaf in early childhood and grew up in deaf culture. If that person chose surgery to restore hearing, he would suffer a terrible loss of identity. What would it mean to no longer be a deaf person?

I went looking for such a story and I found one story in progress. But it doesn't capture well the attitudes of deaf culture towards cure.