Josh Swiller Can Tell You Exactly What It's Like To Be Hard-Of-Hearing

Josh Swiller, who started an excellent blog several years ago about what it’s like to get a cochlear implant, wrote a great article for the New York Times Sunday Magazine today that may be the best description I’ve read of what it’s like to be hard-of-hearing.

He talks about how as a child people thought he was “slow,” until he was diagnosed with hearing loss. Then after he got hearing aids came the frustration of people’s expecations that he would be able to communicate normally, instead of at best only getting “the idea of words” or a conversation instead of the real thing: “With hearing aids, I was expected to hear. But hearing aids amplified every single sound they encountered, including all the background sounds you’d rather they didn’t. All that noise, amplified 90 decibels, was difficult to decipher; voices didn’t produce words so much as the idea of words.” In school, in spite of his excellent speech-reading skills (“I became an assiduous lip-reader, and it turned out that while only about 30 percent of spoken English is recognizable on the lips, virtually 100 percent of televised basketball-coach profanities are….”), he discovers that “‘hearing’ is a fake smile plastered over a losing struggle with fast-talking kids and crowded room” and in college at Yale University he is stumped by a professor whose beard is so thick it is impossible to read his lips. There’s a lot of other great stuff in the article and in his blog. Check them out, and pick up his book, The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa, due out next month.