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Stanford Magazine has a compelling story called "Seeing at the Speed of Sound." The author is Rachel Kolb, a graduate student and intern at the magazine. She describes her life as a lip-reader.
I read the piece with a mixture of awe and concern for her. Awe because she has -- through hard work and sheer force of will -- taught herself to read lips. She's a master at what speech pathologists prefer to call "speech reading." Her explanation of speech reading and how she learned it, and when it does and doesn't work, is fascinating.
Deaf since birth, the author attended a school for the Deaf until elementary school, when she was mainstreamed into a hearing population. The anxieties of classroom life without hearing occurred almost right from the start. She recalls the class being asked to line up to go to lunch.
IT IS THE FIRST WEEK of first grade, and the teacher has instructed us to line up by the door so we can follow her, duckling-like, to lunch," she writes." I do not know that she has asked us to line up in alphabetical order. My interpreter, who is usually around, seems to have disappeared. Satisfied to follow the other children, I take a spot in line and wait. Only then do I realize that my peers are talking, that they are rearranging themselves. I frown when the girl in front of me says something.
"Uh, what?" I say, not understanding her.
She says it again, to no avail.
"What?" I repeat, frustrated at the way the words brush off her lips and fly away.
She repeats herself. This time I understand that it is a question. Well, most questions are easily answerable with "yes" or "no."
I decide fast, "Yes." Surely a positive response will make the girl happy.
Instead, she frowns, and I realize I have said the wrong thing. Panicking, I tell her, "No," then, "Um, I don't know."
She giggles, as if I have said something funny, and whispers to a friend. Then she says it again—and everything clears in a rush. "What's your last name?"
As I answer, a cold surge rises in my chest. Without knowing it, I have made myself look too dumb to say my own name.
My heart broke for her reading that passage and others, like this one, about conversations with college friends:
My companions could be discussing any topic in the universe: the particulate nature of matter, the child who keeps wetting the bed, the villa in Nice that they visited last summer. And, because the human mind is naturally erratic in conversation, ever distractible, ever spontaneous, this is just what will end up happening. How am I to predict the unpredictable? The infinity of the universe, and of man's mind, strikes me as immensely beautiful—but also very frightening.
Ms. Kolb is an accomplished writer. She's also a top student and has been accepted as a Rhodes Scholar for the coming year. She's active with Christian ministries and she's an advocate for the hard of hearing. She was also president of Stanford's Equestrian Team. Clearly, hearing loss has not held her back. And she will always be able to communicate through the written word.
But I hope she allows herself time to be with other deaf people, assuming she has retained enough ASL. The kind of conversation she engages in is too familiar to me. I would do anything to be able to switch to another mode of "hearing," but it's too late for me to learn ASL. I miss real conversation, that rapid ever shifting exchange of thoughts.
I, too, speech read, less fluently than Kolb, and in my case aided by the sounds that I do hear. (For some tips on speech reading, click here.) But I know how lonely it is to be in the middle of a conversation you can't follow. I know how scary and exhausting it can be to try to manage in the dark, or in a crowd, anywhere you can't see lips. Or to read lips obscured by a mustache or a fluttering hand, or belonging someone with a heavy accent, or someone who turns away as he or she is talking.
Rachel Kolb has much going for her, and I look forward to reading her thoughts about living with hearing loss in the future.
