My Hard-of-Hearing Life

I am hard-of-hearing. I have a moderate-to-severe hearing loss in both ears. In one ear, certain pitches have to be as loud as a freight train for me to hear it as well as most people do. I wear hearing aids and I generally get along well. I am blessed with parents who handled my disability quite well. They did everything they could to ensure I lived a happy life and had the opportunities that I needed. As a child, I felt normal. I would see someone with serious physical difficulties and think something like, "I'm so grateful I don't have any physical challenges," and then would realize, "Wait...I do...I'm short." Yes, it's pathetic that I would consider a mild height abnormality to be a true physical challenge. But that just goes to show how I thought of my disability. I felt normal enough to forget I had it at times. But it affected my life a lot. It still does. My parents taught me to stand up for myself and to be able to function with this disability in the real world. Because as much as we'd like to think that society, the government, and technology can fix everything and make everything fair, they can't.

Some people are surprised when they find out I'm hard-of-hearing. And I admit I take a little pride in that surprise. I like to think that I've overcome this trial, at least in reference to how I function and live my life. But in truth, it's hard.

There are a lot of consequences of hearing impairment. The most obvious is that I can't hear as well as other people. I have to ask people to repeat what they say. Sometimes I have to ask so much, it gets embarrassing, and everyone gets frustrated, so I just smile and nod.

Hearing impairment is a mostly invisible disability. Even with hearing aids in your ears, people can't always tell that you're hard-of-hearing. When I was in college, I walked to my classes. Every so often, someone on a bike would whiz past me, missing me by inches, then look back and glare at me. I never understood that until one day, my roommate was walking with me and told me that those cyclists (illegally riding on the sidewalks, by the way) would shout out a warning and expect the people in front of them to move out of their way. I never heard those warnings. I am afraid there are other times when people might think I am being rude by "ignoring" them, when I actually can't hear them.

Hearing aids help, but they don't make hearing perfect. Hearing aids don't filter out unwanted noise as well as natural hearing can. When I am in a noisy room, it's like there are microphones placed throughout the room, and all of those microphones are fed into my hearing aids. I can't hear what people are saying across the room; everything just comes in as noise. So even though proximity makes the people right by me slightly easier to hear than others in the room, there is so much noise coming in, it makes it very difficult to hear and figure out what they are saying. The microphone metaphor isn't perfect, but it's the best thing I can come up with to explain how I can't block out, or ignore, background noise very well. For more about what hearing aids are like, read a previous post: http://ashbelle.blogspot.com/2010/01/ears.html

Many people with hearing loss learn to lipread. I taught myself to lipread at a young age, and I still partially rely on it. A lot of people cover their mouth or turn away when they're speaking to you. A fellow hard-of-hearing (former) classmate of mine once told me her own story with lipreading: She was walking beside someone who was talking to her. She had her head turned, lipreading as she was walking. Because of this, she didn't see where she was going and walked right into a pole. She wanted to explain that she wasn't ditzy; she walked into a pole because she was hard-of-hearing. But that doesn't make sense to people. And here's another issue with lipreading: you're watching someone's mouth. That looks weird. When I was a teenager, I loved going to church dances. Most guys I danced with wanted to talk, and because the music was loud, I heavily depended on lipreading. I was always self-conscious of what this looked like. I'm dancing with a guy and watching his mouth. He might think he had something stuck in his teeth. I was more nervous that he thought I wanted to kiss him or something. Fortunately, if anyone ever thought that, they never tried anything.

Hearing loss makes for some other awkward social experiences. When I was younger, a guy came up to me and asked me, "How are you?" Well, it was loud in the room, and I thought he asked, 'How old are you?', and so I answered, "Fifteen." It was only after he gave me a strange look and walked away that I realized what he really said, and being fifteen, I was embarrassed.

While I was growing up, I was quiet and shy, at least at school. My hearing loss didn't help. I desperately wanted to comment in conversations, but I missed so much of it. I was afraid I would say something someone already said, and afraid I misheard something. I couldn't exactly say, "Ok, all ten of you at this lunch table: can everyone talk louder? Because I can't hear." I didn't want so many people to bend over backwards for me, and even if they did, they'd be yelling their personal conversations. Sometimes I would just tune out a conversation altogether because I had to strain to hear what people said, and that gets exhausting after a while.

On a lighter side, my ears hear some pretty funny things. For example, when my husband and I were new to an area, we didn't know people's names yet, so we used descriptions instead. In one instance, my husband referred to a man as "the one with the slicked-back hair." I heard "the one with the slick back-hair." Yikes.

Many of these kinds of things happen to everyone from time to time. But for the hard-of-hearing, it happens all the time. However, I realize I am very blessed. It could be worse, and it is worse for many people. Hearing aids help me tremendously. I live in a time when, although things aren't perfect, people are much more accepting and accommodating of this disability. (It really wasn't that long ago when terrible things were done in an attempt to "make" the hard-of-hearing hear better.) I was able to learn to play the flute in school, and I still enjoy doing so. I got a good education. I have used my experiences with this disability in ways I never imagined I would.

Let's be more aware and understanding! I hope that we can all try to be more compassionate with each other, disability or no disability. We're all struggling with something, and it is often something invisible. I hope that I, and everyone, can be kinder and less quick to judge.