Am I the jerk for being out of patience?

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To some extent there are similarities between you and us. I was getting mentally frazzled and needed time to introvert and recover and she assumed she was the problem--sometimes she was a contributing factor but usually it was work (I was often very unhappy at work) but by trying to interact with me she was preventing my recovery and making things worse.

As far as ASL. Hmmm.... You have brought back a memory which is almost certainly completely useless these days. In my first year at college my roommate was pretty much completely deaf. He was an astonishingly good lip reader and he taught me the manual alphabet (though I was slow, lacked grace, and had trouble with "K", "P" & "Q"). But I don't know if he even knew ASL and we never used it to communicate. For those times when we needed more than his lip reading and my clumsy manual alphabet we used either a notepad or a magic slate. They were an odd college supply but I took three of them to school with me. Do they even make those things anymore?

I hate looking at peoples faces more than it takes for me to recognize them, but I taught myself to read lips as a supplement to my hearing, though I cant do it without *some* sound yet.

Then everyone had to wear masks. *Jack Benny stare at the camera*

Typically we try to keep it simple with "baby sign", I learned it when I was a child in school (hearing loss not diagnosed until 2018/19), dropped it, then when my little brother was born (diagnosed autistic) I picked it up again to help him communicate.

I do use a notepad at work (warehouse worker) when I come across a soft-speaker or another HoH/Deaf person.

In the future I'd love to see ASL offered to people who have difficulty speaking and not just HoH/ Deaf people because gripping at your chest with claw-hands is WAY easier than saying "im terrified/ freaking out/ having a panic attack" when you're having an attack. You see even in infants that those who can sign get far less upset and frustrated than those who have to rely on their parents being able to *guess* their needs. Why wouldn't this directly translate to autistic/ anxiety/ selective mutism children/ adults?