Imbaba and England

This is a funny story, actually!

So, I’ve been learning Egyptian Sign Language since last October—which is SUPER fun, by the way, but that’s a story for another time. Anyway, so, last April, I was hanging out with a group of Deaf friends, and one of them was asking me about the difference between American English and British English. Needless to say, they can’t hear the difference in pronunciation. They were just told that there’s a difference. So, I was trying to go over the main differences between the terminology here and there because pronunciation doesn’t even matter here. And to do that, I had to use my very, very limited Sign Language vocabulary.

To understand what I’m about to say, you should know that the signs for America and Imbaba (some town in Cairo) both include guns. America is like doing the “wild west” famous move with your hands, sort of like a Sean Connery kind of thing, and Imbaba is like you’re holding a rifle upright against your chest and pulling the safety switch and trying to shoot some poor bird in the sky because the rifle is pointing upward.

Anyway, so I was trying to sign a sentence that went like, “The difference between America and Britain (American and British English, that is) is so and so.” Of course, I never got to the end of that sentence, because I ended up signing, “The difference between Imbabish English and British English is—”

And I was interrupted by twelve different people laughing at what on Earth this newbie was trying to introduce to their language. One of the people in the circle wasn’t Deaf, but he’s practically a Sign Language native because his parents were both Deaf. Anyway, after he finished laughing (that took a while, trust me), he explained to me the difference between the two signs.

And I started laughing like crazy at myself.

Moral of the story, if we can call this satire a story, is … two years ago, I wouldn’t have laughed at myself. I would have mentally whipped myself to death or something! I can tolerate people’s mistakes—I actually believe I tolerate them too much. But mine? God forbid! My ego never lets me rest when I’ve made a mistake.

But see, the thing is, I’ve been through so much over the past six years of my life or so that has shaped me into a kinder person, and by kinder, I mean to myself. True, I still give myself a nice whipping now and then when I screw up big time, but I’ve learned to treat myself as a stranger sometimes. If someone else had made that mistake and embarrassed themselves, would I have whipped the living hell out of them or would I have held them and patted them and talked them out of their humiliation?

I make mistakes all the time. So do you. So does everyone.

I wish everyone gets as lucky as I did having friends like those, because even when they were laughing so hard, they weren’t even mean. They were actually kind. It turned out that they laughed at me because they thought I was cute, making cute mistakes.

They’re among the best things that have ever happened to me. They remind me what being lucky feels like.

July 26th, 2019