Deafness, communication, etc.
I'm roughly 50% deaf in both ears, from at least early childhood. It is a peculiar sort of deafness which knocks out my ability to hear midrange frequencies, normally associated with consonants in spoken English, while leaving me sensitive to higher and lower frequency sounds. I get the missing ~50% of my 'hearing' from lip-reading. Nobody else in my family has the sort of hearing I do, so it is unclear if it is a genetic syndrome or the result of some early childhood experience.
For the five years before school, I worked in a commercial medical testing lab where I had a couple deaf coworkers. While working there, the HR department had hired an ASL instructor to come and give interested employees a basic short-form course on ASL. They weren't expecting competency to result, but instead just some understanding and basic communications. Over the years there I became reasonably proficient at ASL, so long as we were signing about lab-related issues.
It startled me one day to hear another coworker say, "Wow, you can really sign!". I had just expressed a complex sentence with multiple subjects as part of a conversation with our deaf supervisor, but I didn't really think of myself as being that skilled. One day I was talking with a deaf coworker while we had an interpreter around. Because my ability to understand language in spoken or sign form is dependent on my ability to see, I found myself switching back and forth between the two people who were speaking at me... I had to tell the interpreter to stop, as trying to understand the two people talking at me was taxing my resources and making my head hurt.
These days I don't have any deaf coworkers or close friends and don't really have enough proficiency in general signing to go to one of the deaf-meet-n-greet events around. At some point after starting school I came across a TV series involving deaf culture, "Switched at Birth". It's primarily a family drama involving race/money/etc issues... with a heavy dose of deaf culture and cross-culture-shock. I like the show because it addresses the issues arising at the interface of deaf and hearing culture, as well as helping me learn some new signs and keeping the habit of signing somewhat closer to the front of my consciousness.
On a daily basis, my hearing/deafness influences my choices, actions, & experiences. I can talk on the phone, but it is uncomfortable. A comparable experience for the hearing might be to be talking to someone while wearing big insulated headphones. I tend to use txt messages readily, far more often than some of my hearing peers which I've discussed the topic with. Group settings, where an extended conversation bounces back and forth across the group, are difficult for me... causing neck strain as I try to follow the conversation around the group... I tend to position myself in meetings such that I can see everyone at once. In such situations I will easily lose the thread of conversation as I miss semantically critical statements. The people I find myself thinking of in more friendly terms often are those who are willing to backtrack a step to keep me involved. Those who I tend to not think of in such friendly terms are more likely to say, "oh, it was nothing important" and move on, leaving me socially disconnected from the group.
I suspect my hearing issues have biased the relationships I've formed to be with more emotionally intense and obvious individuals. In this it gets hard to tease apart the influences of my diagnostically defined deafness with my autistic personality traits, both being characteristics which interfere with communication. As the emotionally intense and obvious individuals have also been the ones who have been emotionally, or otherwise, abusive to me far more often than I would prefer... I am left with people who I have a hard time reading, either because important details of their verbal emotional expression fall on [my] deaf ears or because my ability to process those emotional expressions is modified compared to the norm. I think it is a good thing for me that the girl I have a crush on falls outside the bounds described by my previous/failed romantic interests. I also think she scares me more than someone I can read better, and that that is a messed up response all around given my history.
For the five years before school, I worked in a commercial medical testing lab where I had a couple deaf coworkers. While working there, the HR department had hired an ASL instructor to come and give interested employees a basic short-form course on ASL. They weren't expecting competency to result, but instead just some understanding and basic communications. Over the years there I became reasonably proficient at ASL, so long as we were signing about lab-related issues.
It startled me one day to hear another coworker say, "Wow, you can really sign!". I had just expressed a complex sentence with multiple subjects as part of a conversation with our deaf supervisor, but I didn't really think of myself as being that skilled. One day I was talking with a deaf coworker while we had an interpreter around. Because my ability to understand language in spoken or sign form is dependent on my ability to see, I found myself switching back and forth between the two people who were speaking at me... I had to tell the interpreter to stop, as trying to understand the two people talking at me was taxing my resources and making my head hurt.
These days I don't have any deaf coworkers or close friends and don't really have enough proficiency in general signing to go to one of the deaf-meet-n-greet events around. At some point after starting school I came across a TV series involving deaf culture, "Switched at Birth". It's primarily a family drama involving race/money/etc issues... with a heavy dose of deaf culture and cross-culture-shock. I like the show because it addresses the issues arising at the interface of deaf and hearing culture, as well as helping me learn some new signs and keeping the habit of signing somewhat closer to the front of my consciousness.
On a daily basis, my hearing/deafness influences my choices, actions, & experiences. I can talk on the phone, but it is uncomfortable. A comparable experience for the hearing might be to be talking to someone while wearing big insulated headphones. I tend to use txt messages readily, far more often than some of my hearing peers which I've discussed the topic with. Group settings, where an extended conversation bounces back and forth across the group, are difficult for me... causing neck strain as I try to follow the conversation around the group... I tend to position myself in meetings such that I can see everyone at once. In such situations I will easily lose the thread of conversation as I miss semantically critical statements. The people I find myself thinking of in more friendly terms often are those who are willing to backtrack a step to keep me involved. Those who I tend to not think of in such friendly terms are more likely to say, "oh, it was nothing important" and move on, leaving me socially disconnected from the group.
I suspect my hearing issues have biased the relationships I've formed to be with more emotionally intense and obvious individuals. In this it gets hard to tease apart the influences of my diagnostically defined deafness with my autistic personality traits, both being characteristics which interfere with communication. As the emotionally intense and obvious individuals have also been the ones who have been emotionally, or otherwise, abusive to me far more often than I would prefer... I am left with people who I have a hard time reading, either because important details of their verbal emotional expression fall on [my] deaf ears or because my ability to process those emotional expressions is modified compared to the norm. I think it is a good thing for me that the girl I have a crush on falls outside the bounds described by my previous/failed romantic interests. I also think she scares me more than someone I can read better, and that that is a messed up response all around given my history.