D/Deaf - Tumblr Posts

hearing aids day 1 (2nd march 2022)

crunchy

loud

lots wow just so many sounds

Ss!!! so much sibilance, oof is that annoying - might develop a lisp in preemptive retaliation/ self-defence

see also: whispering really carries

i can hear my hair and i am not happy about it

scratchy staticky sounds from hair moving, jaw opening/closing, breathing

does the air make sound??? i am confused

i feel high oh my gods on earth

too much behind the ear - ow

masks are a fucking pain right now

voice sounds funny, very conscious of every sound i make - just existing creates so much noise

under water at the cinema - loud crisp too much but also aware of thing in my ear, layer between me and the world, every slightly unreal and held at a distance

spooky

disorienting

music - especially classical so far but haven't tested much - everything else stops/ disappears/takes a back seat - andres rieu ftw - it's incredible, just entrancing and all-ecompassing, holy shit

my voice may change in relation to this (avoid s sounds, lower pitch and volume, kinda drawly because i can hear myself and it slows me down, usually speak very quickly)

everything is sooooo distracting!!!! the world is happening all around me

bereft when i took them out the first time, where has the world gone? everything so dim and distant, genuinely might cry

honestly kinda high key relieved after i took them out the second time jesus wept did i need a break

very tiring but in a different way from how straining not being able to hear is tiring - just so much new stuff to process! brain making ALL the connections wowzer oh boy

did i mention crunchy? because yeah if i could pick one word that'd be it, we're going iceberg lettuce on this

CRONCH

Hearing and History

12th April 2023

So, I recently found out that my level of hearing is a lot lower than I thought it was and probably always has been.

What does this mean? Basically I probably would've benefited from hearing aids and learning sign language as a child rather than relying on self-taught lip-reading, guesswork, and asking people to repeat themselves/be patient.

Let me tell you, people are not always good at being patient.

I have very mixed feelings about this. Listening is very tiring, and I have always said this! I couldn't do mental maths questions because they were on a tape recording. Ditto language listening and oral exams, which I kept failing at school. French was nearly impossible for me because I cannot hear the words or make sense of the month movements. Thank gd for Spanish!

I didn't have a hearing test until I was in secondary school. That policy has changed now in the NHS so hearing loss is picked up very soon after birth. Basically, there were a bunch of points in my life when someone could have intervened to give me the tools to navigate the world rather than just let me figure it out.

I am not part of the Deaf community. I don't know anybody my age who is hard of hearing or deaf. My family thought it was 'normal' because my mum, her sister, and my grandad all have hearing loss. I was teased for being deaf while simultaneously nobody taking the implications of my deafness seriously. It was a lose-lose situation. Essentially, it wasn't that I wasn't deaf enough, it was that it didn't effect me obviously enough for anyone to do anything.

Now I have hearing aids, I can hear music, I can hear lyrics. I can hear (although not focus on) multiple conversations. Birds are insanely fucking loud. Projectors and air-conditioning drive me up the wall. My tinnitus is definitely worse, but that may also be a side effect of long covid (apparently that's a thing). It's a wild experience that I'm still getting used to, a year later.

I would still love to learn sign language. But now's not a great time: I'm tired, working and studying full-time, recovering from covid, and generally have shit going on. British Sign Language lessons are expensive in person, but learning online is something I'd rather avoid as I can't concentrate easily. This means more travel, more money, more time, more energy. This means I have to wait.

I wish I could've had the chance to learn when I was first diagnosed.

TLDR; just because you can work to the point of exhaustion to fit the needs of the world, doesn't mean you should have to! You deserve accommodations. The world needs to bend so that people don't break.