Hearing and not hearing

I’ve been aware since I was young that my hearing was different but I never had the confidence to call it a ‘hearing loss’ and would just shrug or laugh it off as ‘my bad hearing’. Despite school health checks picking it up when I started school, I didn’t wear hearing aids until in my mid-twenties and decided to seek them out- still unsure if I ‘qualified’. (The audiologist had looked at me with disbelief when I asked her if my hearing loss was significant enough for hearing aids. ‘How is your speech so clear?’ asked another.) Ironically, wearing hearing aids increased my confidence in telling people that I couldn’t hear them or that I did have a hearing loss. Something about it being visible made it easier; I felt I would be believed.

My science teacher plays a hearing test on a tape recorder. I begin chatting to my friend, unaware that the recording has begun as I can’t hear any of the frequencies. He asks us to put up our hand when we can’t hear it anymore, but I sit there and feel my face flush scarlet. After a short while he puts his hand up and says ‘ I can’t hear it anymore because I’m old. You’re all much younger than me, so your hearing is better.’ I do not raise my hand.

My parents probably encouraged no hearing aids as a child as they are very focused on physical appearance, fitting in and looking a certain way. Anything perceived as against the norm raised alarm bells for them. Throughout school I passed tests, had friends, and therefore no one thought to mention my hearing loss again. As I grew older I just accepted that I could not decipher the direction of sounds, could not follow speech in a variety of situations, worked so hard to follow conversation that it left me feeling tired, not to mention all the sounds I couldn’t enjoy at all, or that sound so vastly different now. Nowadays I think about how much of my life those areas cover.

I play a song out loud soon after I get my hearing aids, my ex listens to it with me, ‘There!’ I say, ‘I’ve listened to this song probably thousands of times and I’ve never heard that bit before!’ ‘I think you’re hearing the snare drum,’ he replies.

If you have never heard something - how do you know what you’re not hearing? I suppose it never occurred to me how much harder my brain is working all the time to make sense of the world around me, to follow conversation. It blows my mind how effortlessly some people are able to understand speech. I won’t go through all the steps which I have taught myself in order to follow a conversation as best I can, but it’s complicated and exhausting.

My girlfriend can’t sleep again, says she was kept awake again, by shouting or an alarm or birdsong. Is it a superpower to sleep through it all? I slept through a fire alarm, just once, but it was just a drill. I was embarrassed, and I’m not sure how it happened, because I can hear fire alarms.

One thing I find hardest is feeling like I don’t belong to the hearing community or the Deaf community; being in-between the two. I’m not sure when or if this will change, but I try to keep reminding myself that having a hearing loss isn’t an in-between state, it’s a state in its own right, and one that I have much to thank for. Would I think so visually, experience the world so visually, have a variety of quiet and introverted hobbies, without it? (Is my social exhaustion due to my introvertedness or my hearing loss- could I ever know? Oh, but that’s a thought for another day, or maybe for never, for it would only keep me awake at night.)

I’m trying to get better at telling people I have a hearing loss. Though usually they respond that they ‘find it hard to hear sometimes, too’. Which is invalidating.

A girl runs up to me and asks me if I know sign language, and I tell her that I don’t. A man stops me and asks me if i’m Deaf, I can’t remember if he signed it or spoke it, but I understood, and I reply ‘Sorry, no, I’m not,’ embarrassed, like a fraud, he explains he had noticed my hearing aid. A stranger asks me a question but I don’t hear so I apologise again ‘No, sorry’, he looks confused and I know I’ve said the wrong thing. A woman behind the counter asks something I can’t hear, so I guess a response and end up with something I do not want. I go out for dinner with friends and clock the long table and the background noise and know I will only be able to follow the speech of the person sat next to me. I tell a stranger who is drinking beer from a pack of cans and trying to talk to me ‘Sorry, I have a hearing loss- I can’t understand you.’ (Why do I always apologise?) He laughs with a wide mouth and says ‘I’m Deaf.’ and laughs again, as though he is telling a joke, I think he might be, but I don’t know what the joke is.