Get it? Hear. Deaf. Haha.
It's not as bad for me as it might be for other people, because I grew up "hard of hearing." I'm well prepared for the daily embarrassment that accompanies the failure to interpret the sounds that come out of other people's mouths, along with the ensuing struggle to get to a sense of what is actually being said.
It's work. It helps unimaginably to "read lips." So what happens when we have to "wear masks"? Zoom and gloom.
E.g. a masked woman checker is telling my masked wife something, and the masked me (complete with hearing aids) has no idea what she's talking about, but it's something about the upcoming holidays, and there's something in it that sounds funny, so I'm smiling as hard as I can. Out in the parking lot my wife tells me how the checker was talking about losing her job up in Boston and being forced to move and not being sure that there'll be anything for her kids under the Christmas tree. It horrifies me that what the woman said registered with me as funny. Thank God my smiling was concealed by my mask. I hate them anyway.
E.g. 2 the family zoom. No masks! But there are micro-second time lags, ambient reverberation, and shifts from speaker to speaker that dizzy me: whose lips do I read? What I do hear at one point is one dear nephew talking about how he'd just "quit his God," and this is a family that does not do that, but there's everybody nodding and smiling! It turns out (as you probably have guessed by now) that my nephew's announcement was that he had just quit his job, and for very positive and commendable reasons, thus the nodding and smiling.
It can be funny in an absurd kind of way.
These kinds of interactions are made more complex than they are for most people because of my hearing loss. But, as I said above, I'm prepared because I've lived with it to some degree since that long-ago time before the onset of memory when an ototoxic antibiotic started me on this road. Pity the poor person who has had perfect hearing for a long time and has to adjust to losing it.
Still, it's somewhat startling these days when I take out my hearing aids, and a smothering silence descends. It didn't used to be this way. Sure, my coping mechanisms are well-developed; they include excellent hearing aids and a wise audiologist. But the moments without hearing aids when I look at a grand-daughter and I can see that she is speaking to me, but I. Hear. Nothing. For a moment I'm staggered.
Naps are easy, though: Smothering silence is a good pillow.
Don't cry for me, Sergeant Tina.
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