I cried through most of the new movie CODA. Not because it’s a melancholic film — on the contrary, the story is charming and heartwarming — but because I’ve never seen deafness represented in such a visible way.
I’ve always felt I didn’t quite have a place in the world. Born with a rare form of moderately-severe hearing loss, I could never fully be part of the hearing world, yet neither was I part of the Deaf community. I’ve stumbled my way into it as an adult — learning American Sign Language (ASL) on my own — and I’ve discovered that CODAs (children of deaf adults) sometimes feel the same way. As hearing kids raised in the Deaf community, they’ve always had one foot in each world, a fact echoed in the film’s recurring song Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.”
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