Introduction

I am starting this blog because I think its time for me to start expressing myself about my hearing loss. After all, I'm 30 years old. I'm also a stay-at-home mom who is really starting to face the fact that I am deaf and basically, that this one simple fact has a ripple effect on everything--and I do mean everything--in my life.

I'm not sure where this blog will take me, but it is going to be a place to write about my feelings about my loss, share the immense difficulties of going through life with the "hidden disability" that hearing loss is. I am probably not going to share this with my friends and family just yet. I have pretty much spent the last 26 years denying my loss, to myself and to others. I have opened up about it more in the last decade, but its still a touchy subject, one fraught with raw emotion that is comparable to a gaping wound. I have spent my whole life insisting that I am not different, that I can do everything everyone else can, and ultimately at the same time feeling like I am less of a person because I can't hear.

I hope to use this blog to share, vent, educate, and possibly gather a group of readers. I know, that's contradictory to what I just said about not sharing with the people I love, but that will come in time.

A little more about me...I am a writer, and my life goal is to write a book. I have started many...procrastination is one of my flaws. I often think I should just write a memior about being hard of hearing...but then I feel...I can't. I can't share those feelings. I don't want people to know how much it cuts into my entire being. And yet...here I am blogging!!

I am not interested in a Cochlear implant for several reasons. They are shallow and not-shallow. I don't want my head cut open. I don't want to wear wires for all the world to see (yes, I know hearing aids are visible to all the world too, but I am used to that.) I am terrified that it wouldn't work. I am afraid of putting all my hope into it and then...being disapointed. More realistically, having been HOH for most of my life, the rehabilitation part of the procedure sounds long and daunting...and virtually impossible to fit into my life as a wife and mom. I don't feel that I'd have enough actual support...not that I don't have people who are supportive, but the idea of having to take a year off doesn't really appeal to me.

I am also not interested in the "deaf culture". For me, this seems like you are basically taking your loss and making it your whole identity...and I do not want that. I want to be fabulous in spite of my loss, not because of it. I know this is not the popular opinion of deaf people.

At the same time...I want to take more charge of my hearing loss. I don't want to settle for "just okay" if there is something better. I don't want to suffer in silence anymore, no pun intended!!

I will probably start to post on this blog more frequently, and hope that by doing so I can network with other people who share my feelings and struggles.