For the first twenty-three years of my life, I didn’t have to call myself anything. At least that’s what I thought. I bluffed (badly) through my hearing loss until I got my first set of bionic ears. And even then I would advocate for myself but rarely.
Eventually I wised up.
Even before my advocacy began in earnest, I started thinking about what to call myself. I did what I always do when I need to learn something. I started reading about that something. There isn’t an embarrassment of riches when it comes to books on hearing loss. The most common term I came across was deaf.
I didn’t feel comfortable calling myself deaf.
I could empathize only obliquely with the struggles of people like Nyle Demarco or Bernard Bragg or with the challenges faced by cultures I read about in Deaf in America or The Mask of Benevolence. I could hear more than they could and I couldn’t use ASL to communicate like they could. That’s when I learned the difference between deaf and Deaf. The latter is a culture, the former a biological condition. I was not part of Deaf Culture.
Besides, I’d gotten yelled at for calling myself deaf. “He’s not deaf, he can hear.”
After that I tried on many terms; partially deaf, I have hearing loss, hearing impaired, I have trouble hearing, my hearing is rubbish. Lowercase d-Deaf. None of them felt right.
So I continued to read books, to peruse websites, and to talk to others with hearing loss. I was at once relieved and frustrated to learn there was no “right” answer. It gave me the freedom to find what term fit me. But my term proved as elusive as a blue-shelled lobster
I don’t remember having an epiphany. I don’t remember reading something or talking with someone and knowing I’d found my term. One day I just realized I’d been using the term “hard of hearing” most often when meeting people in the DHH Community. The more I got involved with HLAA the more I had to pick a spot on the deaf spectrum. Without coming to a conscious decision, I’d realized hard of hearing just felt right.
People want things to be black or white. Most don’t deal well in shades of gray. There’s value in challenging that way of thinking. I felt, briefly, that I should use deaf and take that as an educational moment. But it would quickly become exhausting to be constantly challenging people’s preconceived notions on how to be deaf. For me, hearing impaired sounds too clinical. All the other phrases I tried took too dang long to say. Hard of hearing was nice and concise.
You know what else is nice and concise? Haiku.
Labels have value,
But don’t reduce me to that.
I’m more than one thing.
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