Hello Harry,
Please excuse me for my rather chaotic reply. Because my time is limited right now I'm just writing out random thoughts in response to what you've said without putting them in order.
It's long because I don't have time to summarise it, so I'm fully expecting to be admonished by the mods for drifting too far off the topic of keyboards
But in my defence, I'm so new here that I'm not yet able to use private messaging, and I didn't want to leave you without a response.
My partner arrives back on the island in six days time, and every visit feels like the first time, so I rush around getting my nest sorted out to make him feel at home. But being halfway through oven-cleaning, I really appreciate the chance to sit down for a bit. I'm not naturally inclined to love housework
Don't have much to add to Badrottie's suggestions but as someone who is 70% deaf (completely in one ear, partial in the other), I really appreciate the candor, sensitivity, and refreshing nature of this conversation. As already stated, people don't really understand or even try to understand hearing loss.
I'm touched to hear that you appreciate the thread. It's so hard to know if anyone else is listening in, and my shyness makes me talk so much that I always imagine people running for cover from the avalanche of words
From what my love has told me, and from the books I've read that were written by other deaf people, the one word I believe characterises the experience most of all would be 'isolation'. It's a terrible thing to be blind, but at least it doesn't have to include social isolation because fast-paced discussion and banter are still perfectly possible.
But to be deaf and to be in the company of hearing people when no one is taking the time to include you in the conversation must make deaf people feel like ghosts sometimes.
I've been on the internet almost from the beginning, and it seems to me that it's a revolutionary force for the disabled (we still happily call it that in our old-fashioned and not very PC outpost on this planet
).
I met my partner by chance through mutual interests on a forum some years ago, and I had no idea that he was deaf at first, but when he told me I realised how much freedom he had found on the net, and it had more than compensated for the social life he chose to give up.
Most of the friends I've met online have turned out to have some kind of physical or mental disability, and the anonymity of the net has shielded them from prejudice or stigmatisation. I am also severely disabled, I have an incurable lifelong hereditary condition, and perhaps my own experience of how ignorant 'normal' people can be has helped me to empathise more closely with what what my partner sometimes has to endure.
He's a a highly intelligent man, and his skills are recognised fully at work, yet since becoming deaf he's had to put up with strangers assuming that he's of subnormal intelligence. I don't know how he controls his anger and frustration in situations like that.
For me, asking someone to repeat what they said is nerve-wracking because of the wide variety of reactions I have received over the years.
I can't find the words to express how angry it makes me feel to imagine how anyone can behave in such a rude and imbecilic way when conversing with someone who'd deaf.
When I first met my Love in 'real' life, I quickly noticed that he was pretending to have understood what I said so that he didn't have to keep asking me to repeat it. But I asked him to keep requesting repeats until he understood, and now we both relax into that slower and more thoughtful rhythm of conversation.
I also think that a lot of people (myself included, before I met him) believe that lip-reading is far more easy and reliable than it actually is, and perhaps that adds to the misunderstandings.
Do you augment what you are able to hear with lipreading yourself? And if so, do you find that people keep forgetting to face you?
There are a lot of impatient people in this world.
That sentence struck a chord in me. On a deeper level it's a profound philosophical observation, and something that underpins many of the problems in Western society. The 'no time to stand and stare' syndrome.
This world seems to be moving faster and faster, and nearly everyone is in a hurry, yet there is only one final destination for us all, and for myself, I'd rather linger along the way
Since meeting my partner I've become aware of just how much nearly everyone talks. Countless billions of words are spoken every day, yet so few of them are meaningful or even listened to. In our Western culture we've come to consider speech as the primary means of communication, and we rarely look for alternatives outside of frozen speech - the written word
Since most people use speech for communication that only serves to increase the feeling of alienation when it can no longer be heard.
So he and I have been exploring other ways of communicating. We both love photography and art, so using purely visual means of communication is one very powerful alternative which we greatly enjoy exploring.
There is also, of course, communication via touch, scent and taste (we love cooking together
).
Also, to enjoy just sitting together in silence, either beside the sea or at home, doing creative things, is another way of expressing love without words. I say 'in silence' yet I know that tinnitus is very often the companion of deafness (and I have age-related tinnitus myself). Just as the blind rarely see 'blackness' the deaf rarely experience silence. Another thing that 'normals' usually fail to understand.
Have you noticed how many people seem almost frightened of solitude and silence? It must be a terrible thing to be afraid of being alone with yourself.
I also lost my hearing after birth as I lost all my hearing in my right ear when I was 13 due to a line drive hit to my head while playing baseball.
That must have been devastating.
Before my Love contracted Meniere's he had also had hearing problems in one ear due to an infection in childhood. To then suffer bilateral hearing loss was quite a blow. His speech remains unaffected, but his hearing aid is deliberately very visible, and that alone can be enough to cause strangers to make all kinds of unwarranted assumptions about him.
Now I've succeeded in setting up the dual keyboards, I'm going to continue my search for other kinds of technology to aid fluent communication. I wish I had the skills to invent a short-range radio communicator for 'talking' when on country walks ( I don't have a cell phone, and can't get the hang of typing quickly on those miniature 'keyboards'). My next project will be to try and find someone who can create something like this for me, as I don't think that there's anything like that around, but I may be wrong. I don't know if it's even possible to transmit text via radio.
I'm sure that more could be done to help deaf people via computer technology. I don't understand why there's so little out there to aid communication. If you have any recommendations or ideas of your own, please let me know.
Harry, thank you so much for writing in. I hope you have supportive and understanding people in your life. My partner is a single father, and his family are all very supportive, as are his work colleagues. This means everything to him. But I would find it hard to imagine what it would be like being deaf and not having that kind of support from others.
And please forgive me if I have been insensitive in this reply in any way.
Tanigeu
