Try earplugs! Even just turning the volume down 70% changes the intensity of words. With earplugs in I could let somebody curse at me to my face and just let it slide. But without, even ambient noises add to a state of unease. A motorcycle driving by has a lot of subtle negative impact to everybody who hears it. You don’t have to be deaf to enjoy the benefits of silence. Hearing is a choice, but most people default to full open.
Having personally seen a woman spend an entire 40 min train trip ripping into her partner in ASL, I question this statement
I’m picturing the partner occasionally looking away and her just doing the “ATTENTION” wave in their face every time
“DON’T YOU LOOK AWAY FROM ME!”
But we start more. We’re an opinionated culture
So do people who realize not everything requires a response.
Sometimes when someone is rude to me or argumentative with me, I look at them like, “did you really just say that?” And then I leave them there questioning their life choices or maybe finding someone else to bother.
Good take. Some things are not even worth engaging with and my life has been much calmer since that realization.
Going back to the shower thought, turning off your hearing aids during an argument is like a live version of putting someone on mute.
It’s taken me a long time to learn this.
Saying “OK” or “I hear you”, doesn’t mean you agree. You can hear someone’s words and leave it at that.
I rarely reply to anyone who has replied to my internet comment. I’ve had my say. They’ve had their say. If we disagree then there’s not much to gain from further posts.
Mostly I can agree with peoples premise. Sure your life is hard, I can agree with that. But I don’t have to agree with your next logical leap of “and it’s all because of the bloody immigrants”.
Mostly I can now hear pretty toxic things and think to myself “if I just continue my life as if that was never said, does it change anything”…the answer is pretty much always that it doesnt matter that someone said some shit. It can easily be ignored.
In fact I like hearing shit people have to say now. I’d rather hear what’s happening inside, instead of you pretending and filtering. Make your character clear. Say the appealing things you mean to. The words are ethereal and I can easily discard them. I appreciate knowing the real you.
A friend of mine would say (in a passive way) “so are you done yet?”
LOL I had a coworker who used to pretend his hearing aids died when he was done with your shit. everybody hated how lazy he was at overnight cleaning and whatnot but he was god-tier as a 1:1 sitter for maladaptively attention-seeking patients. They’d be saying all kinda outta pocket shit to him and he was just so used to faking deaf at that point that they had nothing on him. And I loved having him on our unit when we had sexually inappropriate guys. they’d fake suicidality to try and get one of the 18y/o nursing assistants to masturbate at but NOPE. You, creepiest of creepy sirs, get deaf gassy off-season mall Santa.
get deaf gassy off-season mall Santa
Hahahahahaha
We had a dog that was born deaf, so we taught him with hand signals instead of voice commands. Was completely fine, except when he was doing something he knew he shouldn’t, he’d turn away from you so you couldn’t scold him. But he’d also get curious about whether you caught him doing it, so he’d sneak a look over his shoulder, and then you could scold him and he’d stop.
I wouldn’t be able to scold for laughing at the sneaky dumbness!
We laughed our asses off (which he couldn’t hear), but also tried to make the stern, scolding face when he was looking. He was such a good boy.
Uh, have you ever seen a heated argument in ASL? It’s intense.
To a blind person, a deaf argument would sound exactly like a slap fight from the fury of signs flying back and forth.
I’m learning a bit of sign language since my wife will likely be fully deaf inside 10 years, and one day we were in a food court and I saw two people arguing in ASL.
One of them started getting larger and more abrupt with their movements and the other interrupted to sign “Don’t yell at me.”
I wasn’t paying enough attention to know what they were arguing about, but it made me giggle a bit at the phrasing.
During one ASL argument I witnessed, outside a Six Flags if I remember correctly, I saw something that stuck with me. One person literally turned their back from the other person. It never really struck me until then that it’s so hard to ignore someone yelling at you, but all you have to do with ASL is not look.
When you turn the lights off on an ASL argument
The choice of words reminds me of one of the Comedy Central roasts. Can’t remember which one, but Marlee Matlin was one of the roasters. She’s deaf, but she can speak just fine.
Part of her set was, halfway through, she got Gilbert Gottfried (also on the dais) to “be her voice” for the rest of it. So he read her lines from the teleprompter in his way plus or minus a few tangents. Then this…
I lost it 😆
What?
