Why I’ve Never Disclosed My Hearing Loss at Work

In over twenty years of job applications, I have never once disclosed my hearing loss, and that’s a deliberate choice that anyone with an invisible disability will recognize.

Disability discrimination is illegal, but it’s also very real and nearly impossible to prove. You’ll never actually know whether a rejection came from your resume or from someone quietly deciding your disability was a risk they didn’t want, and that uncertainty is exactly what gives discrimination room to hide. So you do the math. If the disability doesn’t affect the work, why hand someone a reason to bias the decision before they’ve even met you? And if it does need an accommodation, you’re left figuring out the right moment to say something, whether that’s the application, the interview, the first day, or the first time it becomes obvious on its own.

Every person with a disability you can’t see runs this calculation differently, and it shifts with the role, the company, how much accommodation you actually need, and honestly how much energy you have left for the conversation that day. For most of my career I could manage without anyone knowing, because hearing aids are small and I compensate well enough that it rarely came up.

That’s changing for me. As of 2026 I require a Mac for work, specifically because of how my hearing aids integrate with calls, and that’s a hard accommodation I can’t really hide. The conversation I avoided for two decades is probably coming.

Invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It means the person carrying it gets to decide when to make it visible, and that decision deserves respect instead of assumptions.