Being deaf

Lip reading is not a panacea. To illustrate, try mouthing the words "I want to vacuum" -- and be careful who you mouth them to!

It took me many years after college to finally work for a company where there was another developer who was gay and also happened to be my age. We never worked together on projects, but did talk after-work sometimes, just knowing that I wasn't some sort of anomaly was reassuring in many ways.

Like Deaf pride, I don't identify with Gay pride either. Being a shy person to begin with, I have no desire to call more attention to myself. My friends and family know, but I never worked out how to ever share that with co-workers. Unfortunately as a result people assume I'm straight. In a male-dominated work environment, that can be extremely isolating, even hurtful when the inevitable gay-bashing lunch conversation comes up, those are moments where I would gladly borrow your deafness.

Over the years, it becomes a lot easier as I learned to reconcile my feelings, and I figure it'll get easier when I meet someone special enough to frame in a picture, and put on my desk at work. Just like you will.

The difficulty for me is being between two worlds, I can speak well enough that most people don't realise I'm deaf, which creates its own problems as they won't compensate for speaking to a deaf person, even if they know how. Since I was always able to hear with hearing aids, I never learnt to sign as I and others didn't feel it was needed. Lip-reading and a degree of hearing as enough to get by. So when you can't hear well enough to be completely at ease among normal people, but you can't sign either, so you're barred from the totally deaf community too.

I'm in my 30s now, and I've been through the denial, self-loathing and social ostracisation through my teens at school and 20s in University that made life pretty hard. As you've pointed out in your article, people don't intentionally exclude you if you're deaf - but if you miss every other word in a conversation it gets embarrassing asking people to repeat themselves every few seconds! A work environment isn't too bad in my experience, social environments are a whole 'nother thing though. Pubs? Clubs? Even a quiet cafe usually has too high a level of background noise to understand someone...

That said though, don't be disheartened when it comes to relationships. I've had 3 'proper' relationships over the years, the first wasn't until I was older than you are now. All of them have been positive, and my girlfriend in each case has never had an issue with my hearing. If someone wants to get to know you, they will make small sacrifices, small changes in their behaviour if that's what it takes to get to know you. If they're not prepared to make any changes, well, chances are they're not worth knowing in the first place! Simple things like "face me when you're speaking", "Don't talk with your mouth covered", "Make sure you have my attention before you start speaking" are not that hard to do, and remember: It says a lot about the person in question if they can't even be bothered with such simple things.

Sadly, you may find that your deafness will shape what kind of job you ultimately feel most comfortable in. It'd be nice to think that in this day and age, any job should be open to someone with a disability, but that's certainly not going to be the case. Personally, I'm self-employed with my own company after dabbling in the Biotech industry after leaving Uni.

The key thing is, there are awesome people out there who will be good friends. It's just harder to find them for you than it is for normal people. I'm lucky in that the friends I made in High School are still, 15 years later, the best friends I have ever made. Even if it sucks to go into social situations because being the guy "sitting quietly in the corner" gets old very fast, know that every so often you will hit it off with someone and it'll make up for all the crappy times!