I Have No Frame Of Reference for Perfect Hearing

You can’t miss what you’ve never had, and that one idea runs through every part of living with hearing loss from birth.

When someone loses their hearing later in life, whether from age, injury, or illness, they know exactly what they lost. They remember conversations without strain, music with every note, the ease of moving through a crowded room. They have a before.

I don’t have a before. My hearing is my hearing and it always has been. The muffled, incomplete version of the world I live in doesn’t feel muffled or incomplete to me, it just feels like the world, because there’s no comparison point and no mental recording of what normal is supposed to sound like.

This is what I call having no frame of reference, and it touches everything. In speech therapy my sounds were wrong, but they sounded right to me, so I couldn’t hear the target I was supposed to hit. With music, I’ve never heard lyrics clearly, and I don’t really know what I’m missing because I’ve never experienced the alternative. In the classroom, I assumed everyone struggled to follow the teacher and that school was just hard for everybody.

It isn’t denial and it isn’t stubbornness. It’s the genuine absence of a baseline.

This is one of the hardest things to explain to hearing people, because they picture hearing loss as subtraction. You take away the sounds they currently hear, and that’s the experience. But when you’re born with it, nothing is being taken away. This is simply how the world has always sounded to me, which is why the loss doesn’t feel like a loss at all, and that makes it invisible in a way that goes much deeper than whether you can see my hearing aids.

#LLHearingMyStory #HearingLoss