Deaf Identity With Hearing Aids
Hi all!
Having my semi-annual Deaf identity crisis so I’ve come back to Reddit 🫠
Context: I was born 100% deaf in the right ear with normal hearing in the left. Started slowly losing hearing in my left ear in my early 20’s then dropped to severe (except for the sparing of extremely low pitch around the moderate 50dB- 60dB loss level) hearing loss over a few months about 2 years ago. Continued to lose small amounts very slowly.
I am fluent in ASL and have been involved in Deaf culture since I was a teenager, but was raised oral. I wear a hearing aid in the left ear which gives me a significant amount more access than without it- but it’s mostly good for one on one conversation, and even then I must see the persons lips and often also use ASL or a live captioning app. But sometimes I do okay with just the hearing aid.
I used to identify as hard of hearing when I was half deaf, but the drastic change and inability to understand almost all speech without my hearing aid had me change to identifying as Deaf. I just got new hearing aids for the first time in 6 years which are helping a bit more than my old ones- and have me feeling a little imposter syndrome about saying Deaf instead of hard of hearing since I’m catching a little more conversation. A little encouragement or insight would be helpful from others! Of course I know I’m culturally Deaf regardless, but more sometimes feel bad for saying Deaf instead of hard of hearing because I do get some speech access with my hearing aid. But also I was hard of hearing before and my experience and hearing now is night and day difference to that so it feels inaccurate.
Audiogram below is of my left ear (right ear has nothing). Speech recognition on this test with the sounds directly in my ear was like 68-72 and had to be played at like 90dB 🥲 but if speech is played not directly in the ear, just in the room, it’s 48%. I don’t qualify for a CI though because of aided scores being too high still.