Have you ever felt as if you are caught between two worlds – the hearing one and a deaf or hearing loss one?
Lately, I’ve noticed more social media posts venting frustrations about not fitting in to either world or being misunderstood by both.
As a person with lifelong and profound hearing loss, I have experienced some of this frustration, yet I have trouble with the concept of distinct worlds that are exclusively hearing or deaf.
What’s a hearing world? What’s a deaf world? What are the restrictions about who belongs and who doesn’t? Or is using the term ‘world’ an attempt to express the differences and challenges of how we are supposed to communicate with each other?
Deaf Culture has its own languages and customs, but Deaf people may also use spoken language and hearing technology. It’s a way of life, not a country with guarded borders. And is membership in the so-called hearing world limited to people with no hearing loss? That world doesn’t exist. The percentage of people with some degree of hearing loss is staggering and growing, as is the number of people using assistive technology such as captions and amplification.
It’s in our human nature to categorize. Tall people, short people. Left wing, right wing. Our broad categorizations are people who are deaf, Deaf Culture, people who have partial hearing loss (aka hard of hearing, hearing impaired, etc.), and people who can hear. Yet within these basic groups are many shades and degrees of how people self-identify and communicate; it’s personal, based on our experiences, personalities, and beliefs, including stigma.
Hearing loss poses potential communication barriers between people. It separates us. And if we feel we don’t measure up to our ideal of how we should communicate, we feel isolated in our struggles. We allow ourselves to feel lesser than, excluded. But our biggest identity struggle is the one we have with ourselves, not with hearing people or Deaf people.
Author and speaker Brené Brown says in one of her talks:
“Don’t walk through the world looking for evidence that you don’t belong because you will always find it. Don’t walk through the world looking for evidence that you are not enough because you will always find it. Our worth and belonging is not negotiated with other people.”
What we can negotiate is how we carry out our communication. It starts with articulating our needs – without shame – and then all of us doing what is needed, because of our common desire to connect.
How we communicate is just one aspect of our multi-layered identity, and we have power to create and change it. Communication is the glue that connects us, to each other and to our humanity.
