Evie Cryer: How coronavirus helped me find my deaf identity

I have been a primary school teacher for 14 years and I absolutely love my job. I have wanted to teach all my life and can’t imagine ever doing anything else. I remember registering my teddies and teaching them maths when I was 7.

I pride myself on representing aspects of society my children do not necessarily see reflected in their school environment – I’m mixed-race and I’m lesbian and I’ve always been open about both. It has helped me to teach my children to be proud of what makes you, you. 

But my hearing loss was something I did not share. 

Having had originally had surgery on my ears at the age of 5, I eventually began noticing a drop in my hearing around age 23 and, much to my displeasure, was fitted with two BTE hearing aids a year later.

But quickly purchased private ones which would be very, very discrete and would keep my hideous secret. Over the years, my hearing loss became more severe and my hearing aids were tuned to maximise my integration into hearing society. 

One night, in a restaurant with my better half, I realised I hadn’t ‘heard’ a word she’d said over the din of diners, waiters, pots, glasses chinking, feet stomping. Rather, I had lipread everything almost word-for-word.

Suddenly, the excitement at the idea of being able to survive, even in crowded places, without letting on that I struggled to hear (as I was entirely uncomfortable with the labeling myself as deaf) thrilled me. No one would ever have to know. 

And that’s how I continued for 4 or 5 years – my hearing loss was my issue, my problem, so dealt with it. I made decisions based on it (places to go or not go), I adapted my life to hide my communication difficulties and I became more outgoing to cover my insecurity. That extended to work, to school. 

Behind the scenes, I began learning sign language and started playing with labels – hearing impaired, hard of hearing, deaf – but as I could get by in the world without help, I considered I wasn’t deaf enough, and none of the labels felt right.

I could pass for hearing. And, while I started telling my classes about my hearing aids and began being more honest with close friends and immediate family, who had noticed my struggling more and more, I was still uncomfortable associating with d/Deaf people or reaching out to the deaf community. 

Then 2020 arrived and firstly brought lock down. Just me and my family for weeks; no ears (my name for my hearing aids), no struggling, no labels. It was just us and remote teaching and I didn’t have to think about my hearing loss at all.

Although, I continued to play with labels, and practised to become more fluent in BSL, sharing signs though a summer-long twitter project and building a deaf identity on my own terms. But eventually 2020 brought a whole new school system and back to work I went. 

I sat in the school hall with the rest of the teachers, spread out with 2 metres between us and no way of lipreading, behind a visor forming a barrier, keeping my voice inside my bubble and everyone else’s inside theirs. I had never felt so lonely and isolated in my whole life.

Surrounded by people but completely alone and where none of my well-tuned copying mechanisms would work. So, I sat quietly and tried not to draw attention to myself, silently breaking, right in the middle of the room. A friend and colleague who knows me well and whose mum is deaf, suddenly loomed in front of me and asked, “Are you okay, Evie?” To which my response was a bright-eyed, standard, bubbly Evie, “Yes!”, a giant smile and two enormous tears. The first of many. 

I was forced to confront my vulnerability and forced to ‘come out’, for want of a better turn of phrase, as deaf. It was like being thrown off a boat in the middle of the ocean and told to swim for shore. My shore was twitter. There I found people like me, deafened, reaching out and coming to terms with a whole new way of life and I wasn’t so alone. 

Over the following term, masks came into my school, every adult behind a visor and a mask and I didn’t stand a chance. So I spoke out. I told my colleagues how it felt, how lonely it was, and I spoke to the powers that be, in school and adjustments were made: clear panel masks, zones of visors only. I was well and truly deaf and using the word daily. 

That brings us to now – writing this article, I sit here, proud as punch to be telling my story. Its half term and I come off the back of: campaigning for subtitles on social media; championing soaps for brilliantly representing deaf experience and holding them to account when they don’t by co-authoring an article; working with Action on Hearing Loss to raise money and awareness; and becoming a local authority ‘role model’ for the Hearing Support team.

I have my deaf identity. I know who I am, but I don’t think I would have gotten here if it wasn’t for my incredible partner, wonderful family, amazing friends (both virtual and real life)… and Covid. 

Evie Cryer is “a primary school teacher, wife to the most incredible human and mumma to three amazing kids. I spend my ‘spare time’ fighting for equality and access for our LGBT family, our children on the autism spectrum and myself as a person deafened as an adult. And I write!”