Deaf 24

My body is shaking. In darkness I feel like the world is spinning and I am at the bottom of a void. My eyes open and I realise that I am not shaking but being shook. It's time to get up - no soothing Radio Three for me. I jump into the shower. mmm nice and. oh god it's cold - why didn't he warn me he was going to turn the tap on downstairs?

Out of the shower - not in a good mood now - an abrupt awakening, an uncomfortable shower.

Go to the train station. The usually friendly attendant seems nervous and is smiling at me like I'm ill or stupid. Then he starts flailing his hands and widening his eyes in a really unsettling manner whilst opening and shutting his mouth like he has glue stuck to the bottom of it! I realise he is trying to tell me that the train is late. As soon as I acknowledge this he pats me on the arm and puts his hand on my back to steer me towards the train. I frown at him and wonder what gives him the right to be so intimate with me - this is something I haven't noticed about him before - maybe this is what I had to be on guard for!

I get off the train and I am barged past by several people carrying suitcases who gave me stern looks, one of them starts looking angry and mouths something at me in an obviously aggressive way, before I have time to explain he rushes off. I go to the newsagent and when I can't see the magazine I want I go to the counter - no sign for a loop so I bring out a card that explains that I am deaf and asks the person to speak at a moderate pace and to be patient with me. At the sight of this the assistant performs a show that a ham actor doing his best Marcel Marceau would be proud of. She is also shouting - I can tell this because she is very red in the face and the entire shop has come to a stand still. As I turn around I get that well meaning sympathetic look that people seem to adopt when they realise there is a difficulty. Their heads are all cocked to one side. They have benign grins across their faces and they are nodding solemn comradeship with me - they seem to be saying 'yes we understand you are deaf and therefore we need to address the fact that you have a decreased mental ability'. I sigh and inwardly kick myself for not remembering that a side effect of being deaf is that you lose all intelligence. They should really stamp me with a government health warning. WARNING.. BEING DEAF CAUSES STUPIDITY.

Work is chaotic and I can feel the anger from my colleagues when I ask them to repeat something they have said whilst facing away from me - why is it that I feel guilty? At one point they are telling a joke and I ask them to repeat the punch line - this is met with frustration and they tell me it wasn't funny anyway. I guess I would've liked to have judged it for myself - never mind.

At home later I sit down to watch my favourite program. Luckily we have teletext so I can use subtitles to back up what I might miss - although I can tell that I am a little behind and my partner and I laugh at different times. I can tell he misses some of it too when I am laughing over some of the dialogue in the 'wrong' places. It feels strange to be watching the same thing at the same time but to be having delayed responses to it - I guess we are never quite sharing the same joke together.

He hasn't spoken to me much tonight - usually we share our day's events with each other but he seems reluctant to do it tonight. I have the feeling that he is tired and feels it may be too much effort.

In bed I lie awake and reflect on my day - usually this is the only time I am alone. I usually relish it as a time when I am at peace and I can be quiet. Tonight however it feels like I have been alone all day. As I lie there I realise I have gone beyond being alone and I feel lonely, isolated and removed from the security I had yesterday. How can such a shift happen? How can such a slight difficulty have reduced me to this? It hits me. I feel saddened.
There is only one difference between the me yesterday and the me today. The difference is not that I am deaf.
The difference is that people perceived me as deaf.
And this seems to have been a bigger detriment to me than the difficulty itself.

March 2005