#mildhearingloss

I honestly don’t have a description for it that makes sense unless you’ve experienced it, but every time I put on my hearing aids, it feels like going from a slow lukewarm stream into a rushing, cold one. That’s the mental impression I get of it, anyway. But I’m not suddenly “hearing more sound,” it just becomes easier to differentiate it. (For instance, without my aids, I’ll still hear a lot of the nuances in music. With the hearing aids, it’s not that I’m *hearing* more of the music, it’s that I’m *perceiving* it better, and am able to make sense of the finer details)

Being able to hear well enough to tell that there’s music playing, but not quite well enough to be able to answer “yes” when your nephew asks you if you can hear it (he tends to keep his music fairly quiet when he’s playing geometry dash, especially if he’s working on making a level)

Not hearing that someone is talking to you until the second or third sentence, and having to figure out what they’re talking about based on context clues. Bonus points if you ask for clarification, and they answer the wrong question. :P

Now it’s time to play a game called, “is someone talking to me or is it just the house creaking?”

Discovering that the rest of your family can actually hear people talking from INSIDE the bathroom. Like. They’ll be in the bathroom and then they walk out and just casually join the conversation and I’m like “????…How????!!!”

Someone: *says something* Me: “…what?” *half a second later* “OH!”

When you’re in a group conversation and you can hear one person pretty well but not so much the other person, so it’s similar to listening to one half of a telephone conversation-- and it makes about as much sense as one, too.

Two of these in one day; can you tell I’m a bit frustrated right now? lol When you go to an event, but it’s too noisy for you to be able to actually chat properly with anyone so you just sort of hang out and eat and people-watch, waiting for the noise to die down enough so you can actually talk with somebody... But the problem is, when it starts to get quieter, it means people are leaving. Which means the thing is over. And it’s time to go home. So you end up leaving every event of this type feeling socially unfulfilled and kind of wishing you hadn’t gone in the first place, or at least not stayed for the socializing.