By Emily Rafuse
Hearing aids and hearing loss took me a long time to reconcile myself with.
Since I began university, I’ve met more people my own age with hearing loss than I had in the previous 18 years of my life, especially since I grew up in a small town in Nova Scotia where I was the only kid in class with hearing aids. I grew up watching shows like Switched at Birth to see others with hearing loss but didn’t read a book with a deaf protagonist until just this past year. Not seeing anyone like me in my daily life when I was younger left me insecure about my hearing loss, especially with how obvious it was and is (or at least how obvious it is to me).
In the past when I explained hearing loss to others, I would default to using words like ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ even though my hearing loss is ‘normal’ to me, because I knew it wasn’t ‘normal’ to everyone else around me – particularly not the other kids in my classes. Yet, despite hearing loss and hearing aids not being ‘normal,’ for others, it was my normal, so where did that leave me?
Walking into a classroom at school, 9 out of 10 times, I’m probably the only one with hearing loss, though I was lucky enough to have other classmates with hearing loss and hearing aids this past year. As a result, I used to be self conscious, knowing that my experiences were not ‘default’ or ‘normal’ experiences for my classmates which meant that I would participate less and less depending on how comfortable I felt in that moment.
However, the more I spoke, the more confident I became about sharing my experiences and perspectives. A side effect of that was starting to question the default experiences that I grew up hearing about, and how I had internalized it in such a way that it impacted both how I spoke with others about my hearing loss and disability, and the language that I used to speak about my experiences.
Currently I’m working on my thesis and studying the ways that literature upholds and deconstructs the idea of a ‘default’ or ‘normal’ body and how we each have a role in how these defaults are spread and upheld. While I’m not studying pieces of children’s literature that deal with deafness and hearing loss, I am studying books that handle visible, physical disabilities and questioning the ways that I have spoken about my own hearing loss and my own body in the past. As a result, I’ve become more confident and comfortable with my hearing and with sharing my experiences with others – hearing loss is my normal and that’s enough for me!
How do you explain your hearing loss and/or hearing aids to others?