[sdrothrock]

This hits home for me and my experiences.

People often believe what they see and first impressions are strong. I seem like a perfectly functional hearing person 97% of the time, but the 3% of the time when I can't cover the gap, people tend to react with incredulity because they can't believe I have an actual disability. Some days I just don't want to deal with it because it's exhausting.

I've never really found a good solution to this that doesn't just require patience and persistence from the start. The best approach I've found is to be up-front from the start about my deafness and then to just "lie" about not being able to hear periodically to reinforce the "he's got a hearing problem" memory.

In the past, I used to try to be explicit and say things like "I'm sorry, but the air conditioning or something is droning and I can't hear you well," but that generally derails as people try to explain my own hearing to me with things like "that's so quiet, how it is louder than me" or "if you can hear THAT you should be able to hear me," etc.

[candiodari]

I'm not even sure what I've got. I can hear very well. With enough focus I can follow people and animals around at pretty sizeable distances. I practice that. Or perhaps I should say I enjoy doing that, in the dark in the small pieces of forest that still remain where I live. I can easily follow a conversation from 30 meters distance, with sufficient focus.

But I cannot process, and sometimes not focus on multiple people talking, even when they're not talking through one another. I can tell you a lot generally about their speech, just not what it says. Where they're standing, tone of voice, are they moving, what their intentions are. But if there are 2 conversations in earshot of me I cannot tell you what anybody is saying even if they're shouting to me. If 3 people are standing around and talking I can only participate if I totally ignore one of them and just blindly shut them out, whatever they're saying. Sometimes it gets worse and even with little disturbance I just cannot tell anymore what people are saying to me.

People don't understand. In a 1:1 conversation I'm warm, open, attentive and so on. In a 3 way or more conversation, I'm cold, absent, distracted, annoying (because: very bored) ... Worse, often suddenly, from their perspective, I no longer understand them. I've learned to just hide this, and guess, and find some other excuse to turn the conversation back into a 1:1 conversation.

[joker3]

That sounds like auditory processing disorder.

[candiodari]

Reading it, it seems not to fit very well. I can process speech just fine, I just don't seem to be able to switch from one person to another without a long time to make it happen.

[rosser]

> I've never really found a good solution to this that doesn't just require patience and persistence from the start.

The kinds and amount of emotional labor that the "invisibly disabled" have to do for the "normal" people in our worlds is sometimes a full-time, completely exhausting, job of its own.