David, that was a very eloquent and well-written post and I certainly hope that you came away from writing that with a better sense of well-being. I, too, am deaf, but our experiences are different. I was born deaf and am profoundly deaf with 85+ db loss in both ears. At the risk of sounding conceited, I'm what you would consider a success story. A background: As a child, I lived in San Diego, and my parents (at the…
What really gets me though, is when you see those micro expressions flash over peoples faces and then you start to doubt what you perhaps misheard or what you should've said. This is the most annoying of all problems I've ever had to deal with, as I am constantly second guessing myself, which isn't pretty.
Another thing to all deaf people out there who rely on lip-reading -- how do you go for concentration and memory when it comes to having a decent conversation? If I concentrate really hard, I'll find that I can understand what's going on, and converse back. However, if I do too much of it, my brain starts to wander because it simply starts getting too tired to concentrate at such a high level for long which ends up making me feel stupid and I either only remember the start of what they said, or the end.
For hearing people, it goes like this:
>Person says something
>You then have to playback what you've just heard, seen what words they could have said with their lips, the context and the way their body language is.
>Your brain then does some computations and tries to figure out what's being said
>Your brain then tells you to say XYZ
This goes for every word they say. So if you're not concentrating at 120% you'll miss some words. Context is important, because I LOVE YOU can also look like COLORFUL if you're trying to lip read someone -- but you won't fool any professional lip reader like us ;-)