Why being deaf is good

Woohoo! Today is Thankful Friday and I am most deafinitely thankful for the forthcoming weekend as it has a bank holiday Monday in it – meaning more time to do fun stuff!

This weekend I am off to Devon with Miss K – her rents live down there and the promise of chilling out, catching up and tasty BBQs had me booking my train tickets quicker than you could say, ‘Mine’s a burger please!’

Today, I am also thankful for the lovely comments I have got since my new column in the Hearing Times was published, including one from Demented Demon
who also writes for the paper.

It’s a very exciting thing to know that I have a monthly column in a real paper. At first I was a bit nervous in case Gemma – the lovely person at the Hearing Times thought it was rubbish. But phew – she didn’t! I haven’t seen it yet but can’t wait to have a look at it in print!

*blush

Anyway, about every six months, I get quite down about my deafness – it’s like my tolerance threshold starts to get low and I find myself getting frustrated about things that wouldn’t normally bother me – like missing out on chitchat at work, or mishearing something someone says.

When this happens though, I have string of ‘there-there dear sentences’ I say to myself to remind me that life's alreet really.

These include things like:

Your deafness makes you more headstrong and determined to get what you want in life

Or

It means you get free and discounted travel

And so on and so forth…

But just sometimes, I am reminded completely out of the blue of the good things related to my deafness.

And that's just what happened on my bus journey home last night.
There I was, surrounded by people nattering away on their mobiles or reading the paper but in the absence of the London Lite Text Column, I found myself looking out the window.

Now, one of the things I’ve discovered as a deaf person is that my eyes do the job of my ears quite a lot. They look for sounds, such as sirens, people’s lips moving, and things flashing or vibrating. And what this also means is when I look at things, I don’t just glance, I really drink them in. Commit things to memory, look in every corner of the horizon, up, down, left and right.

And it was while I was doing this that I clocked the most magnificent sight. Two huge swans in flight together high over the London rooftops. It was amazing to see these white long-necked creatures cutting across and sunny sky and I watched them until I could see them no more.

And do you know what, I felt incredibly privileged to see that sight in my own little muffled existence.

It's like someone took away clarity of sound and in return gave me a secret vision of the world around me.

That's is of course until I take of my glasses...

Then, well, I have to resort to smelling things!