Living well with hearing loss is not instinctive. We must learn how to do it.
Nothing in a person’s personal experience prepares them for the emotional, life-changing impact of even a mild change in hearing. We don’t just hop to it, adopting strategies that will help us deal with communication barriers that we never realized existed. Even if we’ve had hearing loss for a long time, possibly our entire lives, is no guarantee we’re good at it. We often still struggle with frustrations and listening situations that seemed designed to cut us out of the conversation, every time. We get in our own way.
Why aren’t we better at having hearing loss?
Because we don’t know how. We don’t know what we don’t know. Perhaps we feel we don’t have the right to ask for accommodation or feel too embarrassed. Maybe because no one explained it to us, because maybe we didn’t ask.
I was 40 years old before a had a transformational meeting with other people with hearing loss. What I learned in a two day conference stuffed my toolbox, which previously only had a hearing aid and the ability to speechread, with new tools and a new confidence.
Hearing loss doesn’t come with a how-to manual. People with hearing loss aren’t helpless – but we need help from somebody or somebodies to tell us what we can do, but here’s the secret: the job starts and ends with us. Correction – the journey starts with us and continues with lots of help along the way.
Whether we are pushed from behind by our family or friends, it is we who make the appointment for a hearing assessment. We choose to follow up on our hearing care professional’s recommendation of a hearing aid.
Yet our audiologists and hearing instrument specialists should be doing more than this, and many are. They know that hearing aids don’t fix hearing loss, the way that wearing glasses corrects vision while being used. A good professional will dig deeper and be concerned with our struggles. They will point us towards developing other strategies:
- Being comfortable in self-identifying with hearing loss
- Understanding how to create positive listening environments, with good lighting, low noise, and face to face communication.
- Understanding that we have the right to let people know what we need and don’t need
- Using resources such as other people with hearing loss, books, articles, social media, etc.
There is no shame in having hearing loss, so instead of apologizing for it, we can stand tall and create good communication. And that starts with learning what will make our personal hearing loss journeys as smooth and productive as possible.
Who can tell us how to be good at hearing loss? We can. Our hearing care team can. Other people with hearing loss can. And so can the people we love.
