I have mentioned before in this here post that I am half deaf - I can hear very little in my right ear, if anything at all. In the post I went into what life can be like when living with a hearing impairment e.g. missed conversations, misunderstood instructions, and the difficulty of trying to find your phone when it's ringing! Genuinely, being deaf in one ear really skews your senses and it is sometimes very difficult to gauge where noises are coming from.
I need to reiterate that I am not writing this for sympathy and I am in no way whatsoever comparing myself to someone who is fully deaf, I am simply giving my side of the story.
I know how isolating it can feel when you're sitting in a busy restaurant and all of your friends are laughing at a joke that you didn't catch. Or when somebody whispers in your ear for a third time and you feel rude to ask them to repeat it again. So you just laugh and they think you're mental because they're telling you that their dog is ill or something.
I can only imagine how lonely it can become if you find yourself fully exempt from social situations due to your lack of hearing. Therefore, I recently started my journey, on something that I have wanted to do since I was a teenager, and have begun learning British Sign Language (BSL).
So far I am doing the training via online tutorials and videos and I have learnt numbers 1-100, colours, and fingerspelling the alphabet. Each week I cannot wait until I complete my next lesson and feel such a sense of achievement when I get that sexy little green tick to tell me that another unit is complete.
I want to continue to learn BSL until I am fluent and can fully communicate with those that are deaf or hard of hearing. Some people may think that it is a strange skill to learn but not for me. I see it as merely another language to learn to better communicate with those around us. People learn Spanish, French, Italian, all the time but haven't considered learning BSL at all?!
Who knows, maybe one day you'll see me strutting my signs on the Hollyoaks omnibus!
Hello and welcome to This Ruth Is On Fire, a UK blog which is a haven for random thoughts and sarcastic observations.
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