Somewhat Silent

I never realized exactly how much my siblings loved me until I moved out and learned some independence. How to navigate an unfamiliar store and ask questions and engage salespeople in a conversation that fit my needs.

Then, while back for a visit, my brother and sister both brought me to two different stores to shop for things. My sister to a craft store, and my brother to an electronics store.

They had never seen me act very independently before, as I had been a clingy child/teenager, preferring to interact only with the familiar, and have them do my talking for me.

I learned later that they had each watched me communicating with the salesperson, and that they had each been hyper-aware of all the minor transgressions that the salesperson made. Turning away while talking to me, etc. Normal hearie-mistakes.? Nothing that even bothers me so much anymore (unless I’m all emotional and PMSing). I’d redirect the salesperson and politely remind them to look at me while they were talking, and the whole thing would go very smoothly.

But later that night, in a conversation with my mother, I learned that both my sister and my brother had been furious and sad at the fact that I had to perform these minor redirections. They thought that the salesperson was rude as well as ignorant, although they mentioned nothing of that sort to me. They just gave me spontaneous tight hugs after we left the store.

I had never realized exactly how much they loved me, exactly how much? my hearing loss must have bothered them, and how it must have hurt them to have to watch me jump through all the hoops that I found to be commonplace and every-day.

The poor souls never grew the calluses that I had grown.

While talking to my mother earlier she started referring to random pieces of poetry, and reciting bits of it that she knew and liked. I realised I couldn’t actually parse the poetry very easily as the manner of her speech changed to something unfamilliar.

My maternal grandparents, my mum and older sister all enjoy poetry, they give each other poetry books as presents and in letters to one another will often write out a poem that they enjoyed or felt particularly suitable for the occasion. The last conversation I had with the grandfather in question was about his lifelong collection of poetry and what it meant to him.

Now I’ve never seen the point in poetry myself. Yes it’s often clever and I can appreciate the linguistic forms in the way I can appreciate mathematical puzzles which are clever. Could it be that poetry is fundamentally auditory in nature, that to appreciate the beauty and meaning one has to have the auditory processing which can recognise and relate to that?

Certainly if I talk to a poetic friend who reads and writes poetry this would seem to be the case for at least some people. She who was unable to learn her times-tables was eventually taught them as a series of rhymes/poems and to this day she can only use them if she recites them in the way she was taught.

Does anyone here like poetry, hate it, indifferent to it? And why?

I love going on roadtrips to here, there, anywhere. Just the notion of getting the heck outta dodge gives me a sense of refreshment and adventure, even if it’s only for a weekend jaunt to the next nearest city (mostly Chicago). But there’s one painfully frustrating aspect that kills me every time.

Usually, I’m with my old college group on these trips. At some ungodly hour of the morning, 4-5 of my friends pick me up and off we go, armed with Starbucks, iPods, and bagels. As the city traffic melts away behind us, I promptly shift my pillow against the car window and go fast asleep. The indistinguishable group banter of my friends against the noise of expressways and freighter trucks is too painful for my deaf heart to hear (or rather, NOT hear). My friends will talk, laugh, and tell stories for hours on end - and I sit in silence, patiently waiting for the next pitstop to initiate any kind of conversation. Sometimes, for entertainment purposes, I’ll watch my friends lips move and fabricate a dialogue of what they might be saying - kind of like that improv game “scripts”. But for the most part - I’m just drenched in jealousy and resentment that I cannot partake in this rite of passage - this social interaction that others take for granted with ease.

When we finally reach our destination - everyone gets out of the car, bright-eyed and good-natured with having that 5 hour verbal bonding experience (kind of like the ending of “the Breakfast Club”). Me, I feel mostly out-of-whack and completely disconnected from the group - full of bitter wonderment of just what did I miss out on? What shared stories about my friends will I never know because it will never be mentioned again - them assuming that I had heard it the first time around? What jokes did my mouth did not bust out laughing at? What revealed secrets was I not privy to? It hurts and it sucks to not have the same experience as the five people sitting next to you. Deafness sucks.

Hello All,

I am Natalya aka barakta. I have been reading and commenting on somewhatsilent for a while. I live in Sheffield, UK, with my girlfriend of four years Kim, in a small rented house. Kim is an electrical engineer with an extrodinary gift for bodgery and sarcasm. We are both hoarders of almost anything electrical, especially marginal technology which needs tender loving kicking to keep it alive.

I have a severe/profound bilateral mixed conductive/sensorineural hearing loss which I have had since birth (audiograms at http://www.barakra.org.uk/stuff/audiograms/). I wear a bone anchored hearing aid (BAHA) and have had that since 1992 (http://www.entific.com). Before that I wore an ‘alice band’ bone conduction aid made by Phonak.

I was mainstream educated for better or worse thanks to education authorities being obligated to provide appropriate support systems for me. Despite the first bout of vertigo hitting during my exam years I escaped school hell with moderately good GCSE grades specialising in sciences and two foreign languages. I then spent three fabulous years at a Roman Catholic 6th Form College which I loved gaining myself three crappy A-Levels which got me into The University of Sheffield to read chemistry. I hated my chemistry degree and after a year of failing and poor support from my tutors I jumped ship to the Information Studies department where I completed a degree in Information Management.

I am currently not working due to my vestibular system having failed on me for the second time (the first was while I was at school). I am currently trying medication to stabilise the vertigo that I have. I am also concerned that this time I have suffered damage to my inner ear resulting in increased tinnitus and hearing loss. I have an audiometry appointment in two weeks which will hopefully give me reliable information one way or another about my hearing.

Five years ago I started learning British Sign Language which was a lifelong ambition of mine. I had taught myself and a friend how to fingerspell, but experienced hostility from other children whenever we ’signed’. I passed stage 1 extremely easily, so much so, that the examiner thought I had been to a ‘deaf’ school and been signing for years. I had a few years break due to shoulder problems before starting stage 2 classes with kim last year. We are currently in our 2nd year of stage 2 which is going well if a little exhaustingly due to three hour classes!

Once I get the vestibular system knocked into shape I will get back into the job market and seek out the quickest and most useful way of getting back in academia. I am hoping the Department of Work and Pensions (social security) will allow me to do some distance learning ICT *spit* courses while I am still in recovery.

I am sure there is more that I could say about myself, but I think this gives you enough to go on for now.

I was fourteen, almost fifteen years old when a friend of my mom’s decided that it would be fun to introduce me to AOL chatrooms. This was 1994, and the chatrooms had not yet de-evolved into the utter crud that they are today. Text flew by at a rapid pace, next to screennames. I had never even really used a computer before–except for the occasional game that we’d play in “computer class” in elementary school. This was a far cry from playing “Oregon Trail” or “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego”? These were people. Speaking in text. Whole conversations, overlapping, in what my mind experienced as “closed captioning”. I watched, my eyes eating it up, and then did something that I had not done since I lost my hearing nearly 10 years before. I jumped in. To a conversation. With strangers. I haven’t hesitated since. The internet is my element. It has been my home since I was fifteen. And I can no longer imagine life without it. How did you feel when you “discovered” the internet? What was life like before it? And now?