Liam O’Dell: Confronting the hearing aid taboo

Happy New Year to you all. As the clock struck midnight and I stumbled into a new decade, I’ve decided that this year will be the year that I decide to take my campaigning to a whole new level.

University and a whole host of other things towards the end of the 2010s meant my regular Twitter rants about inaccessibility had to be put on the back burner while I worked on other things. Now, of course, I’m presented with a new year as a deaf freelance journalist, so I’ve got a bit more time on my hands.

Although, that is not to disregard the last decade completely. I’ve already talked about this in a rather lengthy Twitter thread, but it was between 2010 and 2012 (the exact year escapes me) that the audiologist told me that I might benefit from wearing hearing aids.

In the space of 10 years, I have delivered TEDx talks, written for national newspapers and of course, typed many an opinion piece here on The Limping Chicken – with many thanks to those who read them!

Yet, as New Year’s resolutions make us all reflective, I realise that there’s perhaps one thing holding me back as I move ahead with my campaigning. Even now, 10 years after taking my first steps into the deaf world, I struggle to say the word ‘hearing aids’ in conversation with peers and family members. There’s some inner feeling which comes along if I even manage to utter the words. Is it a taboo for me? Is it shame? Embarrassment?

The audiologist’s suggestion that I may benefit from hearing aids was, at first, overwhelming. If you’ve stuck around for long enough, or dig deep enough into The Limping Chicken‘s archives, you’ll find a time where I sported a bizarre, bushy haircut as a way to cover up my hearing aids.

I had a lot of stuff on my face as a teenager, from spots to spectacles, and the idea of throwing something else into the mix was a lot to take in, in the beginning. As I made more connections in the community and thus became more confident, you’ll find the odd mop sported in the above headshot.

Though this brings me on to an interesting Instagram post a good friend of mine Naomi shared recently, all about hearing aids and how we mention them in a discussion. In particular, it’s intriguing that we can gatekeep how we present them in both a physical and conversational sense.

You can keep your hair short at the sides if you want your hearing aids to be visible to others, or have your hair covering them if you’d rather keep it discreet. You can mention them when talking to friends about your deafness, or not. Every decision we make in this regard is, of course, totally valid.

In my case, however, having chopped off the hair and being proud of my deafness in terms of appearance, I feel it’s time to embrace my hearing loss in a conversational sense, too, and not shy away from mentioning my hearing aids in a discussion.

I suppose it’s the same as apologising when I struggle to hear someone. “Sorry, I’m deaf,” I say, but I’ve seen some talk online about how the first word is unnecessary – and that’s right. We shouldn’t have to say sorry for being deaf, and it is by no means an inconvenience.

Make no mistake that I am deaf and proud, but as I look to become a better campaigner this year, the fact that I still can’t fully express my experience with hearing aids just yet is holding me back a little bit. So it seems that in order to move forward, I’ve got to go back to the start.

Photo by Ollie Cole.

By Liam O’Dell. Liam is a mildly deaf freelance journalist and blogger from Bedfordshire. He wears bilateral hearing aids and can be found talking about disability, theatre, politics and more on Twitter and on his website.