Author: Christina Lisk

The Name I Call Myself

Picking a term to describe our hearing is fraught with implications.

The idea behind “hearing impaired” is that we are lesser human beings and must be fixed to function.

Those who suffer (dare I use “suffer”?) from mild to moderate hearing loss do not necessarily identify with the term deaf—a word that is historically loaded and also carries a distinction between capitalized and lowercase “d”. Uppercase “Deaf” reflects a community and a culture of identity, and carries pride similar to that of ethnic and religious groups. Lowercase “deaf” can reflect only severe to profound hearing loss, or hearing loss on the whole, depending who you ask.

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Dating with Hearing Loss: the Good, the Bad, and the Stories that Make You Say, “What?”

The audiologist will tell you many things when you get your first hearing aid. Keep it dry and don’t wear it with wet hair. Put it in a desiccating box, and change the gel packs every six weeks. Blue stickers mean the left ear, and red stickers mean the right. Come back once a year to get it re-adjusted to your latest decibel range. Cover it up to keep from getting sweaty during sports practice. Always leave your hearing aid at home when going to the beach. Clean off the wax as often as you can so the microphone does not get clogged. No one can hear anything if their hearing aid is full of wax.

Absent from this long list of warnings are instructions on how to proceed through the infamous dating game with a hearing loss.

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Cheating the Test

It has been said that cheating is wrong, dishonorable, and hurtful towards others as well as yourself. The measurements for final scores become skewed, making the results incorrect for everyone, including you. I learned not to cheat on 99.9% of tests when I was fourteen, after I was nearly expelled from middle school for cheating on a science exam. Since that grievous mistake, I have taken honor codes very seriously and resolved to never cheat on an academic exam, even when I feared being kicked out of my major or not making graduation.

There is one test, however, which I always cheat.

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How Hearing Loss Influenced My Taste in Fashion

Everybody who has met me knows that I have a very strong, yet unpredictable sense of style.

One day, I will wear a blue high-low dress that floats over the floor as I walk. My eyes are blue and silver, and my legs completely black from the illusion created by leggings and boots. The next, I might step out in hot pink skinny jeans and a Gap kids’ shirt with a starry-eyed cat, paired with black thigh-high boots. Cat wings will grace my eyes, and sometimes, I’ll wear heart-shaped glasses if I feel really psychedelic. In college, I actually received a prize for having the most colorful fashion in the entire school. Frequently, I am the fashion consult of my family and friends. The outlandish, erratic nature of my fashion is, ironically, a signature style.

My freedom to dress so outlandishly was acquired by the alienation that came from my hearing loss and chronic ear infections. Other middle school students frequently called me a “retard”, and harassed me in every class because of my hearing loss.

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Hearing, Listening, and The Polar Express

“You must have hated The Polar Express when you were a kid,” my friend Stacy said to me.

The two of us were sitting in our class, Writing for Children, talking about picture books. As the semester came to a close, we were finishing our unit on illustrated stories, and meandered to The Polar Express. Being a Caldecott-winning story adapted into a movie, it was an ideal book for class discussion. Most of my classmates heard it at least once, and had their own stories about hearing it for the first time. Mine was not particularly memorable, seeing as I was nine and the elementary school librarian read it to my class.

At least…I did not think it was memorable until Stacy pointed out a central theme to the story.

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The Day I Heard Santa Claus

It was 6 A.M. on Christmas morning. My brother, Doug, and I had woken up much earlier, but our parents said, “Don’t wake us up before six.” Each minute seemed to drag before, finally, we could spring into our parents’ bed shouting, “WAKE UP! IT’S CHRISTMAS!”

Both of them rolled under the covers, in hopes of grabbing a few more seconds of sleep. My dad cried, “Spirit! Haunt me no more!”, before letting my brother and me climb into bed. It was very easy to fit two parents, a four-year-old boy, a six-year-old girl, and a two-year-old cat under the same sheets. We were all warm, snug, and full of Christmas cheer. Inevitably, my Dad would always ask the same question, and it would always break my heart.

“Did you hear Santa last night?” My dad asked.

“Sure did!” Doug replied.

“Oh…yeah…me too…” I stammered, faking a smile.

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The Inadequacy of Grateful Journals

Thanksgiving just went by in the United States, and Christmas is arriving exactly 28 days after. With the arrival of a season revolving around thankfulness and generosity, I have thought a lot about how people show their gratitude. A common method promoted by inspiration sites and figureheads like Oprah is the “Grateful Journal.” One is expected to write a list, ranging from three to ten items, of things for which they are thankful and explain why. Grateful journals are often suggested to individuals going through difficult transitions to maintain a positive outlook on life.

Roasted Turkey

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Hearing Things and Horror Movies

When I was thirteen years old, I loved horror movies. The scarier, the better. Bring on the bloodbath, and the ghosts and the ghouls. The louder you could scream, the harder I would laugh. Nothing in a horror movie could scare me, and I wanted to see the most shocking, frightening things possible. Sadly, my brother was terrified of horror movies, so I could not get the R-Rated ones into the house. No matter how hard I tried, he’d tell Mom and Dad, and I’d be forced to put them back. With a little bit of quick thinking and the line, “it’s only PG-13”, however, I managed to see The Grudge in the summer of 2005.

That summer was a series of firsts. Along with my first time succeeding in getting a horror movie back home, it was also my first summer with a functional eardrum and working two different jobs.

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Art and Resilience: Communication in the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf’s Art Show

I was not sure what to expect when I first visited the art show for the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf.

Through the month of October, Philadelphia’s City Hall has the artwork of deaf children, ranging from ages 5 to 18 in grades k-12. Drawings, paintings, sculptures, and even articles of clothing are encased in glass for spectators to see. Obviously, hearing loss does not impair one’s ability to create visual art. Though I was very excited to see this show, I also wondered what the specific appeal would be for art created by deaf individuals.

Once I got to the show, I was very surprised by the profundity, detail, and depth of each piece on display.

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Parker: The Boy Who Taught Me About Shame

There are very few things about which I feel shame. Shame: “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong and foolish behavior”. Note this: the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.

However, we are often made to feel shame over the silliest things. Some people are made to feel ashamed because their clothes are “so last season”, or they are unable to have a certain amount of income. Many of us who read and write for Open Ears have had at least one experience with shame over hearing loss. But where is the “wrong and foolish behavior” in having ears that do not function as we believe they should? This ill-placed experience of shame causes us to forget what is truly wrong and foolish behavior, which we should justly feel ashamed of.

Sad boy alone in a bare room

How do I know what it’s like to carry a wrong idea of shame? At age 16, I learned what shame really was by becoming a bully.

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