What did you say? Come again?
A lot of us have hearing loss, and it's not clear when it becomes a disability. Profound deafness is clearly disabling. What about those with lesser hearing losses -- or more complicated, frequency dependent problems? That depends on which frequencies you can hear...
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I have a severe, frequency dependent hearing loss that cuts across conversational range. I can hear vowel sounds pretty well, but consonants are often lost to me, even when my hearing is corrected. I can hear well enough out of one ear that I can talk on a normal phone. I do my best to read lips, and sometimes I do better than other times.
Perhaps it isn't a disability, but it is a disadvantage.
I started to lose my hearing in my twenties, in fact, it was when I took a routine hearing exam for a job that I discovered a problem. There is something elusive about hearing loss -- if you can't hear a particular sound, you don't know you've missed it. From there, my hearing plunged from moderate impairment to severe, although I didn't discover how bad it was until I had a job interview about six years ago.
At the interview, I misunderstood all sorts of instructions about how to check in and who to contact about what, and this resulted in my waiting for two hours in the reception area while my interviewers thought I was late. My first meeting was brutal, in that my interviewer was so soft spoken that I couldn't hear any words coming out of her mouth. She even said, "Let's answer this question quickly. Or maybe you can't do anything quickly." The rest of the interview loop treated me like I was profoundly dumb and sent me home.
I got another interview at the same company, and I tried to get accommodation. The only accomodation they had was a sign language interpretor -- which was not what I needed. So, I got no accomodation, and things didn't go much better. The assumption, so I was told, was that anyone who didn't know the answer would cry deaf to get out of addressing a question. So, I'm judged as a fully hearing person, in spite of my disadvantage.
This has plagued my entire career. It's not legal to discriminate against a deaf person -- but I fall short of "deaf". My problem is that if your mouth is covered or you're not looking directly at me, I cannot know what you're saying. I might not know that you're talking to me at all. And if you're looking at me when you're speaking, I still have to deduce what you're saying. That takes time, so if you're not patient or if you assume that a hesitation means I don't know what I'm talking about, then you're my problem. And if you're certain that I'm faking, and insist on talking to the back of my head all the time, you're an asshole. You also make up about 50% of the people I encounter in the professional world.
It's so obvious that I'll cry deaf to cover up the fact that I'm stupid.
A colleague approaches and says, "I put a zipper on my porpoise."
Step 1: What kind of context exists that will help me parse that???
Step 2: What could "zipper" possibly mean? (No idea.)
Step 3: What does "porpoise" mean? (Got that from context. It means "surface.")
Step 4: What did he put on his surface? What kind of work is he doing? What is he interested in? A vague recollection of a group meeting talk he gave last month tells me that "zipper" could mean "krypton," "xenon," or "argon." Probably not argon. It could be krypton or xenon, though.
Step 5: Is there additional context that helps me understand whether or not it's krypton or xenon, or do I have to observe the conversation and guess until I can figure it out???
This is how I experience human conversation. I try to be gracious and I do my best, but sometimes I come across as rude, stuck-up, stupid, aloof, absent minded, whatever. But I never come across as something positive when I stuggle to understand people's speech. I sometimes think I'd like to break into the private sector. I have a whole lot to offer, but I can't seem to get past this. I'll figure it out, though.
But here is the thing: hearing loss is common. Really common. We come from a culture that ridicules people who can't hear in the same way it ridicules people with cognitive disabilites. They are the indentifiable other, and damn it's funny to watch them struggle.
So next time you talk to a person with hearing loss, be patient. Look at them, but don't exaggerate your words when you speak. That makes you impossible to understand, and you will appear extremely condescending. And don't yell, either. For me, it just creates a bunch of loud vowel sounds that are harder to parse than before.
Be kind to the next person who doesn't follow what you're saying. They might not be able to hear you.