Although I have mentioned having a physical disability quite often, I have another disability that I do not talk about all the time: being deaf/hearing impaired. Deafness is lacking the power of hearing or having impaired hearing; hearing impairment has a similar definition, but it is more of not being able to hear well. While I do use a wheelchair to aid me in getting around on a daily basis, I also wear cochlear implants to aid me in hearing everything. A cochlear implant is a medical device that replaces the function of the inner ear; when a hearing aid is ideal to make sounds louder, a cochlear implant is ideal to work what is damaged of the inner ear and pick up sound signals.
When I was a baby at the time of getting the diagnosis, my parents had to make a decision of whether it is ideal to leave me as deaf or work for me to be functional within the hearing world. Being hearing parents, they chose the option for me to become someone who would learn to listen, hear, and speak within the hearing world. From an early age, I’ve had to have speech therapy multiple times a week, and I went to a school for the deaf until I did well enough to mainstream into a hearing school. After getting the diagnosis of being deaf, I had hearing aids; I wore them up until the year the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made the approval that children with severe to profound hearing loss could get a cochlear implant.
Getting a cochlear implant in 1999 led me to being in first grade for the second time; possibly as a way for me to get used to hearing well enough before mainstreaming. Because of being held back for a year, I was the oldest of the classmates who graduated with me up until high school. The past 17 years have been amazing with the transformation of cochlear implants going from a device that is visible to a device that is hardly visible nowadays. Despite how physical disabilities are mostly visible, being deaf is completely invisible and only deaf/hearing impaired individuals can manage with it. With being deaf/hearing impaired, we can only control whether we want to hear or not; there’s nothing that anybody else can do because they don’t know anything about what being deaf is like.
Being deaf/hearing impaired gives us the control whether we want to hear or not. Despite many efforts made by hearing people making us try to wear our hearing aids or cochlear implants at all times, some of us make the choices not to wear anything when there is nothing going on. We choose to be deaf to the world, due to the stress caused by audio stimulation; sometimes the sounds around us can be too much at times that we choose to turn ourself off for a while. Sometimes, this can be handled differently; if a deaf person has bilateral devices like I do, they can choose to listen with one device and leave the other device off, unless there is a use for wearing the other device for recreational purposes.
While there is an advantage of being able to control whether we want to hear or not, there are also disadvantages in living within a hearing world. The hearing society has high expectations for deaf people to hear so much, meanwhile they can easily filter out the sounds that they do feel like listening to. With this disadvantage, hearing people can be selective in what they do or do not want to hear, while deaf people have to manage listening to all of the sounds at once. Sometimes with so much expectation, there can be a lot of disbelief in the people who are deaf/hearing impaired in functioning with all that they can do.
In 17 years of being able to listen within a hearing world, I have accomplished so much. Similar to cerebral palsy always needing to be accommodated with what works, being hearing impaired is very similar! A lot of people have a difficult time accommodating for hearing impairment because they do not understand the experience the way deaf people do. The tricky part of being deaf is the fact that we have to deal with the expectations on a daily basis; there is no way to stop these expectations, no matter how hard we try.
