Interview with Abigail from “Bachelor”

Renca Dunn, Daily Moth Reporter: Hello Abigail, I’m really happy to have you here with us today. Thank you for taking the time to have this interview with us, for The Daily Moth. We’d like to get to know you a little bit better. So would you mind going ahead and introducing yourself and telling us where you’re from?

Abigail Heringer: Yes, so, hello everyone. My name is Abigail, and if you’re not aware, I was on the show, The Bachelor. I’m originally from Oregon, and I grew up in Salem. And then I moved to Portland for a few years, and now I just recently made the big move to New York about a month ago. So umm, that’s a big change but that’s a little bit about me.

[Abigail meets Matt Jones for first time and tells him that there’s something a little different about her -- that she is deaf and will be reading his lips a lot]

Renca: I personally have this burning question that I really want to ask you. I’m excited to ask you this. I’m curious about what your communication and interaction with the women in the house was like. Was it easy for you? Could you see group conversations, and were you able to feel involved or was it easy for you to follow? I wanted to ask you about that.

[Abigail is in a “group wedding” date. She and other contestants are dressed in wedding gowns and running around in the forest. There are instructions given and a lot of distractions]

Abigail: Yes so, at the beginning it was a little bit harder. There were about 30 -- 28 of us all in the house at the beginning. It was a bit hard sometimes when we were all sitting on the couch and all of us were talking about what was happening in the house, or what we think was going to happen. I wasn’t the most vocal as I was trying to figure out where the voice was coming from, and then by the time I figured that out, then the next person would start talking. So, that was a little bit hard. But all the women in the house were incredible, as they had just met me a few nights prior. And they were so willing to repeat things and I could nudge somebody next to me to ask who we were talking about or what did they say? Then they would always repeat these for me. That was the biggest form of acceptance you can give me in a group setting. Then it definitely got easier as less girls were in the house. At meal times there were less of us sitting at the table. But I told myself that it was a blessing in disguise that I didn’t always hear everything, or voice an opinion on a lot of things because there was a lot of drama in the house! So that’s a big part of the reason I was able to stay out of it just because I didn’t always follow right away, you know, the things that were going on.

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Renca: On The Bachelor show, and on your Instagram story, you did mention that you aren’t a member of the ‘capital D’ -- Deaf community. You did mention that. So I’m curious, what were your experiences with the Deaf community. If you could share an experience that you had, what would that be?

[Abigail “I was profoundly deaf so it means I have no hearing. So if I take my cochlear implant off, I can’t hear anything. But I’m also not a member of the Deaf community with a capital D because I don’t use sign language.

--Okay

I’m able to communicate vocally.]

Abigail: Yeah, so I think the biggest thing that I wanted to make sure when I was going on the show, and I was saying that I’m deaf. I just wanted to respect the Deaf community, with the ‘capital D’, because I didn’t want them to feel like I was trying to represent all types of hearing loss. Because I feel like that undermines a lot of what goes into the Deaf community. So that’s why I just wanted to say, you know, I’m deaf, but at the same time, I don’t use sign language. There are all these different forms of hearing loss and here’s what I represent. I represent having a Cochlear Implant but being able to communicate vocally. But it’s not going to be the case for someone that’s in the Deaf community. So that’s what I was trying to emphasize to make sure that I wasn’t falsely representing the ‘D’eaf community. In terms of my experience, and the reason why I wanted to be very careful on how...my take on whether I’m a member or not, was in high school. I had a sign language class, and the teacher was Deaf. He was great, I learned a lot from him but he was also very vocal about how Cochlear Implants are not a “good thing”, you know, it’s “tearing the Deaf community apart”. He was very vocal about it. And I’m not someone who gets offended easily. I just understood that that’s his perspective on life. It’s not something that I should take personally. But I also knew that he’s not the only person that feels that way. So that’s why I just wanted to make sure that when I’m talking about my own experiences, it’s my experience but it’s not gonna be the same for everybody in the Deaf community as well.

Renca: Yeah. Would you be interested in taking more classes -- maybe learning more sign language later?

Abigail: Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it’s always fun just to pick up some signs.

Renca: Again, thank you for your time. We at The Daily Moth wish you the best of luck with your dating journey and your new life in New York City.

Abigail: Thank you guys.

Renca: Bye-bye.