What it Takes to Listen
Although I’ve been hard of hearing my entire life, I hadn’t spoken to someone who was also hard of hearing until just last week. As a matter of fact, I can clearly remember when I’ve seen someone else my age wearing hearing aids. These three encounters are some of my most vivid memories:
- Age 8. In a playground at Disneyland. I notice a girl, slightly younger than me, clambering up a structure while grasping her mom’s hand to steady her balance. I’m struck by how happy she looks.
- Age 12. In my audiologist’s waiting room. I walk in for a check up and sit across from a girl wearing a pair of soft brown boots. I feel too shy to tell her I like her boots.
- Age 15: A classmate in my math class asks our teacher to repeat the question because she didn’t hear it the first time. She is one of the few in my math class that is always engaged in class discussions and answers questions, even if she doesn’t have the right answer.
During these moments, I was terrified of having a conversation about my hearing loss, even with someone else that also wore hearing aids (I’ve avoided situations where my hearing loss is focused upon). My insecurities with my hearing aids began in second grade with questions from my classmates:
“What are those things in your ears?”
“Why do you talk weird?”
My peers were perhaps genuinely curious rather than trying to put me down, but I still felt judged and singled out. Not knowing how to talk about my hearing loss has kept me from opening up to other individuals — although I am learning to accept my hearing loss as a part of my identity, I still try to hide my hearing aids out of fear that:
- People will stare at my hearing aids and feel too awkward, scared, and uncomfortable to ask or initiate conversation.
- Someone will ask, and I won’t know how to talk about my hearing loss.
My hearing loss can be part of a personal identity that creates a deep disconnect between myself, others, and the world around me.
I instantly felt comfortable opening up with Matt Argame, a former Stanford Medicine X ePatient and HoH advocate, about my hearing loss.
During a phone call last week, I surprised myself by talking freely about my hearing loss with someone I had never met before. I expected my lifelong insecurities about my hearing loss to perpetuate silence, but Matt’s openness about his experiences with hearing loss created a space for me to talk about my experiences in turn. This space nourished and nudged our conversation to move beyond acknowledging our feelings of vulnerability and isolation, to creatively trying to understand how to change the experience that led us to those feelings.
As it turns out, I always knew what to say about my hearing loss, but never had a space to express these stories, thoughts, and ideas. My hope is that the Hearing Accessibility Project will be that inclusive, living space outside of our private conversations with our audiologists and families.
