Deafness Is Not the Hard Part
Being Deaf is like having a Blind spot…. But you’re Deaf.
I didn’t know this until recently but: we all have blinds spots… and I don’t just mean metaphorically. I “knew” this in an inside-of-the-Snapple bottle sort of way but not REALLY really.
There is a point in the human body where the optic nerve converges, and “the area has no light-sensitive cells to detect light rays”, so we literally all have a point within our vision where our brain just fills in the rest.
Context Clues.
They are the bread and butter of being Deaf. Sometimes (often) people will remark on the fact that they can’t believe I’m Deaf and I really wish that ‘Context Clue Theory’ made more sense to those not experiencing it… But technically, we are all experiencing it, always.
“The thing we should really be amazed by is the fact I’m still doing what I’m doing in terms of health,” I say in my head, when Deafness becomes the topic of conversation. Most of my doctors look at my charts and say that whole, “Wow, I thought you’d be in a wheelchair” thing and then I wonder if that’s supposed to be a compliment.
Deafness is not the hard part. Do I wish the world wasn’t so auditorially based and people would caption their damn content? Yup. But do I know the hard part of my day is continuing to (metaphorically or literally) move forward with whatever is going on medically? Yes.
If you think, “There’s no way she understood all of that by lip reading”, it’s because I didn’t. I’m pretending. I’m filling in the blanks. I’m using context or previous knowledge of the person and their speech patterns. Or, occasionally, I genuinely am just faking and don’t circle back.
But I am not that remarkable. Some Deaf friends are very good at the Guessing Game of living in a hearing world, and some are prefer not to be, aren’t naturally, or always WANT to circle back- because that’s their right. I, in a sense, am just a bad advocate for myself… and a better actor than I give myself credit for.
The world is full of people who can hear… they just don’t listen.
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This is what human brains do they fill in the blanks from memory. I think the brain and especially memory is an amazingly powerful thing with what it can do to help us understand outside stimuli. I am staying to learn to read lips because I've got severe hearing loss in the human vocal frequencies. Even in a quiet room I have trouble hearing the whole conversation, and any background noise at all I'm lucky if I can even catch a quarter of the conversation. I have to fill in the blanks, and read lips. Sometimes it's too noisy and overstimulating, and I just nod at appropriate points and fake it. You are a decent advocate for yourself, but I do wish you'd advocate more around your own medical team it would help you out greatly. That said you are an excellent teacher and advocate for others (once again we're generally better with others than we are ourselves), and you help so many advocate for themselves or at least make them feel more comfortable and less alone. Yes that whole wheelchair thing is supposed to be a compliment to your will too thrive. You should be proud of where you're at, and what you're doing with all of the health struggles you have to battle daily. Is it fair or easy that you have to fight these battles daily? No and I won't dismiss the struggle those battles cause you, but the way you handle them and honestly kick their butts is seriously impressive. You have a will to thrive I've only seen in two other people, and you should be damn proud of that. We all have parts of our lives (physically and metaphorically) that we are blind to, and if we listen to our brains and memories we can actually see the patterns but that is usually in hindsight. It is so much easier said than done filling in the blanks in our own lives. Btw this pic of you is absolutely gorgeous. For being a minimalist in makeup and getting gussied up you have a natural beauty that doesn't really need all that external attention, and that should make you feel good about yourself.