Gwern Branwen

When you're hearing impaired, you understand acutely how quickly conversation moves.

Milliseconds kind of just separate the moment between you jumping into a conversation, everyone letting you talk, and someone else talking over you, and you not getting to say anything.

And it's just an awful experience if you're a kid who's already kind of introverted.

It's not like I was very extroverted as a kid or now, so that was always a barrier.

And then you had lots of like minor distortions, right, in your life.

I had this weird fear of rain and water because it was drilled into me that I couldn't get the hearing aids wet because they were so expensive.

I would always feel kind of a low-grade stressful anxiety around anywhere near a pool, like a body of water.

And I'd say even now, I always feel weird about swimming, which I kind of enjoy.

But I'm always thinking to myself, oh, wow, I won't be able to see because I'm nearsighted.

I won't be able to hear because I had to take off my hearing aid to go in.

I can't hear anything that anyone says to me in the pool, which takes just a lot of the fun out of it.

Yeah, I think it definitely led to me being so much of a bookworm.

That's one of the things that you can do as a kid, which is just completely unaffected by having any kind of hearing impairment.

It also was just a way for me to get words and language.

Even now, I think that I often speak words in an incorrect way because I only learned them from books.

It's the classic thing where you kind of like mispronounce the word because you learn it from a book and not from actually like hearing other people sound it out and say it.

Yes.

Um, the, the deaf accent is from the hearing impairment.

It's funny.

At least three people on this trip, um, to SF have already asked me where I am really from.