Need an research paper on the self-hood. Needs to be 6 pages. Please no plagiarism.  .However, Deaf culture remains open to him, and he finds himself a welcome place in it. Being a deaf child and adult brings many special disadvantages, including the difficulty of finding one’s place in the hearing world, which is so vastly different from Deaf culture. Drolsbaugh eventually learns to appreciate his uniqueness and takes that as a formative factor in creating his identity, which depends heavily on Deaf culture and the joys of deafness.
Deaf Again, as an autobiography, is comprised of accounts drawn from Drolsbaugh’s own life as a child and young adult growing up with a disability. The story follows him from the moment of his birth to the birth of his son Darren. He accounts for his experiences in deaf and hearing schools in detail and possibly provides insights to individuals with children who might experience the same kinds of troubles. Of course, a significant difficulty for children with special needs is precisely their uniqueness. The question of the self revolves around identity: what makes this individual unique as a human being? A deaf child in a hearing school is unique as a human being, but children typically find this situation troubling. They are quite often concerned only with being as everyone else is and being “unique” or “different” in any sort of obvious way is shamed. This may have something to do with how children tease each other, and that having uniqueness gives other opportunities to exploit that difference for their gain. One sees less teasing among human adults, and so individuality is a valued possession. Nevertheless, for a young Mark Drolsbaugh, being different from his peers was unbearable.
During the third grade at Plymouth Meeting Friends School (PMFS), a small private school in Pennsylvania, Drolsbaugh felt the pain of uniqueness. On a winter day, playing tackle football, a tackle knocked his hearing aid out of his ear. The battery was lost in the snow. According to Drolsbaugh, “It was a quick and sudden reminder to everyone that I was different” (29). In this case, his deafness made him feel too unique for comfort as if all of the class’s attention was on him. For a young, disabled child, this can be traumatic: being the center of attention for so many “normal” people. Drolsbaugh felt embarrassed about his special equipment and felt especially discomfited about Quinn, the class clown who Drolsbaugh was incredibly paranoid about and suspicious of, in terms of teasing.
