Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #llhearingmystory, aggregated by home.social.
After we drove four hours from Cleveland to see RIT, I walked the campus and it felt like home, and then both doors to it closed on me at once.
NTID rejected me because my hearing was apparently too good for a school built only for the deaf, and then RIT's general admission turned me down because my grades were too low, dragged down by years of D's in a Spanish class I couldn't even hear.
Most universities treat support for deaf and hard-of-hearing students as something you request after you arrive. RIT built it into the foundation instead.
Every class at RIT, across every major, has interpreters available, so a deaf student can study mechanical engineering or computer science and get the same options as anyone else, with captioning and note-taking already there.
In eleventh grade a letter showed up that changed my whole life, and it came from NTID at Rochester Institute of Technology.
It was a university built for deaf and hard-of-hearing students with a software engineering degree, and every class had a sign language interpreter. When my family drove out to see the campus, it felt like home, because there my hearing loss wasn't an obstacle.
The same hearing aids that helped me in the classroom made me a target on the playground, and nobody warns a kid about that trade.
The FM receiver, the headphones, the aids behind my ears, all of it was visible, and being visibly different in elementary school is the same as being vulnerable. A kid weighs hearing the teacher against getting picked on, and the cost usually wins.
Fifth grade did something to my confidence that took me decades to repair, and I've talked about that teacher with my therapist as an adult.
The year before, Mr. Kovacs had a voice I could actually hear, and I felt capable. Then I landed with a teacher coasting toward retirement who, on top of the hearing loss and bullying, made me feel small and not worth the effort.
People made decisions about my education for years, and for most of them I wasn't in the room.
An IEP is supposed to be built around the individual student, but the conversations about mine happened between my mother and the school, and I was the subject of the meeting, not someone at the table. The kid in the classroom knows which accommodations help and which just look good on paper.
I tried to fail Spanish on purpose, and I passed with a 62%.
The class was brutal and I couldn't access any of the audio, so I figured if I failed, the school would drop me from it. I stopped trying and read a programming magazine in the back instead, but between guessing on the audio tests and scraping points on the written work, I cleared the bar and got stuck with two more years of it.
Learning a foreign language is one of the hardest things you can ask of a person with hearing loss, and most people have no idea why.
Almost everything about how we teach languages runs through the ear, so a second language stacks the difficulty on a shaky foundation. A student can learn the grammar off the page and still fail, because the listening tests measure whether they can hear.
https://lambdalynx.dev/hearing-loss-language-learning-barrier/
My mother insisted I take Spanish in ninth grade, I made it through two and a half years, and I never got higher than a D.
The listening tests broke me, because the teacher played a tape of native speakers once at full speed with no words on a page, and that just turned into noise for me. I could do the written work, but those D's dragged my GPA down for a reason my ears couldn't reach.
In over twenty years of job applications, I have never once disclosed my hearing loss, and anyone with an invisible disability will recognize that choice.
Discrimination is illegal but nearly impossible to prove, so if it doesn't affect the work, why give someone a reason to bias the decision? That's changing now, because in 2026 I need a Mac for how my hearing aids handle calls.
https://lambdalynx.dev/invisible-disability-disclosure-work/
My speech therapist told me people would assume I was stupid if I didn't fix the way I talked, and I was a kid, so I believed her.
She said it like it was motivation, but it just planted a fear I carried for years. In over twenty years of leading teams and presenting to executives, not one person has ever questioned my intelligence over my speech. Scaring a kid was never motivation.
https://lambdalynx.dev/speech-therapist-shame-fearmongering/
You can't miss what you've never had, and that idea runs through every part of living with hearing loss from birth.
When people lose their hearing later, they have a before, a memory of what normal sounded like. I don't. The incomplete world I live in just feels like the world to me, and that absence of a baseline makes the loss invisible in a way that goes deeper than my hearing aids.
My S and R sounds were wrong. That's what they told me, for nearly a decade.
Speech therapy ran from first grade through tenth, and the whole time I practiced sounds I couldn't fully hear, trying to hit a target I couldn't aim at. In over twenty years since, nobody has ever struggled to understand me, and the gap between what they fixed and real life was wider than anyone admitted.
https://lambdalynx.dev/speech-therapy-ten-years-hearing-loss/
Most people assume reading starts with sound, but for millions of deaf and hard-of-hearing kids, phonics simply doesn't work.
Phonics assumes you can hear the difference between sounds like "s" and "sh," and if you can't, the system falls apart. Deaf kids learn through patterns and word shapes instead, and plenty read just as well as their hearing peers. They got there on a different road.
A woman named Mrs. Rios taught me to read, thirty minutes a day, every day, for six years.
Most kids learn to read by connecting letters to sounds, but my profound hearing loss meant those sounds were never fully there. Mrs. Rios figured that out and taught me to see language instead, breaking words apart by their shapes, and that shaped the rest of my life.
Every pair of hearing aids I've ever owned came with a dehumidifier, and that should tell you how fragile these devices really are.
Hearing aids and moisture do not get along, and the early ones were so sensitive that even sweat could damage them, which is strange for something meant to be worn all day. I still take mine out for anything physical, and every night they dry out.
In third grade the school gave me an FM radio system to help me hear the teacher, and I hated it from the first day.
It was a bulky box clipped to my pants and wired to headphones, and in a classroom where I was already getting picked on, it just made me a target. I rejected it almost immediately and never gave it a fair shot. Fitting in mattered more to me than hearing the teacher clearly.
People always tell me to just get the tiny, invisible hearing aids. I can't, and I never could.
The style you can wear is set by how bad your loss is, not by how it looks. With profound loss I wear behind-the-ear aids with a fully sealed mold, the most visible option there is, and the severity makes that choice, not me.
Fourth grade was my best school year. It took me years to understand why.
My teacher was a man. For the first time, I could hear without hearing aids. Lower-pitched voices land in the frequency range my ears can actually process. Hearing loss isn't uniform. It's frequency-dependent.
The louder the room, the worse hearing aids perform.
Early aids amplified all inputs equally. Signal and noise together. In a cafeteria, the voice you needed got buried under amplified chaos. The environment matters more than the device.
https://lambdalynx.dev/hearing-aids-background-noise-problem/
I kept my hearing aids in my school desk. Never took them home.
When you've never had perfect hearing, you have no comparison point. The loss didn't feel like a loss. The solution didn't feel like a solution. I rejected the thing designed to help me for twelve years.
Hearing aids in the early 90s were amplifiers. That's it. They made every sound louder, equally.
The teacher's voice? Louder. The cafeteria with a hundred kids? Also louder. There was no filtering, no way to isolate the voice you needed from the noise around it.
"When I get my hearing aids, will I be able to hear you?"
Six years old. First grade. Teacher across the room. That question was the first time I truly understood I had a hearing loss. Not because someone told me. Because I figured it out myself.
Most people use the word "profound" casually. In audiology, it's the most severe category: you can't hear most sounds without amplification, and even with aids, significant gaps remain.
I didn't understand what that actually meant until well into adulthood.
https://lambdalynx.dev/profound-hearing-loss-classification/
At four, I was dressed in a sombrero and serape, holding a maraca, and had no idea what anyone was singing.
Even today, with modern hearing aids, I cannot hear lyrics in music. What looked like a distracted kid was the earliest sign of permanent hearing loss.
That preschool moment wasn't a phase. It was the beginning.