What would your life be like if some major aspect of it had never existed?
If you had met someone else to be your life partner? If instead of mediocre, your artistic and physical talents were world-class? If you looked different, or were raised in a different country or culture?
If you didn’t have hearing loss?
While it’s fun to imagine life as a brilliant singer, or being raised in Paris, France, I have difficulty visualizing what on earth I would doing now if I could always hear.
It can be painful to contemplate what might have been; the only-ifs can be a little crazy-making. The fact is, I’m a hearing loss ‘lifer’, from mild-as-child to its current state of profound loss. And since developing a burning passion for creative hearing loss advocacy, through writing and speaking/performing, not only can I scarcely imagine life as a ‘hearing person’, I also wouldn’t want it.
Hearing loss has permeated every corner of my life.
During my 20s and 30s, I held back from doing certain jobs because I knew I wouldn’t be able to hear well, on the phone, or in meetings. (And no person with hearing loss ever took the minutes!)
I held back from social situations knowing that conversations would be painful and exhausting.
I bluffed my way through thousands of conversations. What did I miss out on?
I have my own set of lyrics for songs (the ones not printed in the hymn book).
I wore the stigma of hearing loss like an invisible cloak.
Until it slithered off my shoulders to the ground.
When I connected with other people who lived with hearing loss for the first time, snap! My life changed.
When I saw other people exuding confidence rather than shame, who wore their devices with pride, who laughed at their shared mis-hears, who loved to talk about hearing loss, I wanted what they had. I grabbed it.
I was no longer just a hard of hearing person who used hearing aids. I operated with a new and powerful self-image as a woman in charge of her own hearing loss journey – which impacted everything about my life.
My career and volunteer work now focused on hearing loss issues. My interactions with my husband, child and family improved, although still subject to the usual frustrations of human relationships, because I knew strategies for better communication.
I realize that, without hearing loss, I may have married the same man and had the same child, and my long-time friends would be the same, but my life experiences and career choice would have been different.
The life I love to imagine is the one where I meet other people with hearing loss sooner, where the AHA moment occurs 10-20 years earlier than it dead. But I would have been ahead of my time, since organized loss support groups only started gaining national recognition in the mid-1980s, and the modern boom in assistive technology approximately ten years later. So, I was in the right place at the right time, a fact for which I am grateful.
With or without the ability to hear well, the basic ‘me’ is the same. Without the many barriers of hearing loss, though, life would have been better in many ways. Yet I would not have the same sense of pride and purpose I feel in turning these challenges into positive outcomes.
