Working Around What you Can't Fix

“Can you hear me when I talk this low?” She muttered.

When people find out that I am hearing impaired, they try to figure out how bad it is. There’s a distinction from when you are deaf and when you have hearing loss. People hear things differently than I do, but I don’t recognize that I perceived it incorrectly. When people say, “Madison you’re yelling.” I don’t acknowledge that I was yelling. Hearing loss is not something people automatically notice, and it’s hard for me to remember that I am hearing things differently because I have dealt with it my whole life. My hearing problem affects many different aspects of my life, including the way I grew up, the way I talk, and the way I take in information.

When I was 6 years old, I was placed in the class where the teacher had a black, circled microphone around their neck. I had the teachers who taught the kids with disabilities. Truth be told, I never understood why I was known as someone with a disability because I didn’t think it was a big deal. When I looked around the sunlit room, I saw the little kids around me get into a circle for show and tell. I remember glimpses of my teacher from kindergarten with a long sleeve, gray shirt on, asking me, “Madison can you hear me?" I thought to myself, did she really think I was deaf? When she would talk into the microphone for more then an hour, I wouldn’t be able realize she still had it on because I was so used to hearing it that way. I remembered that when she did turn the microphone off after using it for a while, I had trouble hearing her and couldn’t adjust to the lower volume. I felt like I should have been able to hear her. I was always placed in the front of the room, so it wasn’t until I didn’t have a microphone and was sitting in the back of the room that I saw a difference.

When I speak, my mind tells me that I hear myself in a regular American accent. I hear my voice differently than others do, and when I hear myself in a recording, it takes me a second to realize that it’s my voice. I wonder why my mind hears something one way, but it comes out a different way. When I was in 5th grade my dad, who had squared glasses on, and a shirt that said AAMCO on it and I were in a meeting with a speech therapist, talking about how I didn’t need to be monitored anymore.

“Ever since she was little she has had this certain accent that makes it hard for others to understand her. Now that her voice has begun to mature, will that accent go away?” My dad said.

I had never realized before that I pronounced things differently than anyone else. I looked at the speech therapist who was answering my dad’s question and thought about how people always say, “what” to me because they misunderstood what I was saying. I felt bad and embarrassed because the next thing I noticed was the speech therapist saying,

“It is common for kids with hearing loss to not enunciate when they speak.”

I was really confused because when I speak, I hear myself enunciate. That was when I realized that I’m not just hearing a lower volume than everyone else, but that it can affect other abilities I may have too.

Information is the key to helping people succeed in life. That’s how we learn and keep moving forward. I have learned that when I am taking in the information, or reading the information, I don’t understand it as quickly as others might. When I was 14 years old, a psychiatrist gave me a test that helped me notice how much my hearing problem really affected me. She gave me a test that showed me a pattern, and then I had to create that pattern using blocks. I stared at the puzzle and I couldn’t identify what direction I should put the shapes in. I got frustrated because it was a simple task, but for some reason I couldn’t do it. My face got bright red, and the psychiatrist could tell I was embarrassed.

“Just take your time you're doing fine.” She said hesitantly.

I was able to tell from the way she said it that I wasn’t doing it as quickly as she thought I would. In that moment, we both realized that was part of the reason I had to take the test in the first place. To actually narrow down what affected the way I learned. The psychiatrist explained to me that I was able to do a lot of things including reading quickly and memorizing things, but when I actually need to run the process through my mind, I have a slower time.

It wasn’t until I actually began to mature that I really understood the way my hearing loss affects me. I didn’t realize that my teacher was asking me if I was able to hear what she was saying not only to make sure I knew what she was saying, but to make sure that I fully comprehended what she was saying. I now have ways to work around my hearing loss when I am taking in information, including repeating what a person says to me a few times, and pausing for a second to actually give myself an easier chance of understanding. I learned how to speak slower so people will be able to understand what I’m saying, and if I needed to enunciate for anything I learned that if I bit on my tongue for a few seconds, it helped me to do that. Sometimes when you have a problem that you can’t fix, finding ways to make it work with your life is the solution.