Bird droppings

I'm going to ponder this out on here because there *are* a few people listening, and I figure what-the-hey.

So, over the past week, I've been paying a lot of attention to my hearing problems, what I now know is CAPD. For the most part, my experiences seem to resemble someone that has experienced a mild to moderate hearing loss, depending on the environment. As speech slows down and background noise diminishes, my hearing improves. But as speech speeds up, background noise increases, my attention wavers... I start to lose comprehension.

In practical terms, what this means most of the time is that I have to ask people to repeat themselves somewhat often relative to an ordinary hearing person. Every now and then, I'll get into a situation where I simply can't understand someone, like today at lunch, the waitress was pretty much unintelligible to me.

One important difference I've noticed between myself and ordinary hearing people is that most hearing people don't seem to have to work too hard to hear things. They can just passively sit there and listen, and it all comes to them. For me, real listening is something that takes a considerable amount of work. I'm constantly running back and forth over the sounds a person is making, trying to figure out what they all mean, using contextual clues, expressions, and other methods to fill in the blanks and actually "hear" them. I *can* sit back and listen passively, but I don't actually hear all that much. Only a few things here and there hit me, more in a quieter environment.

On the bright side, so much of the English language is redundant material, I can miss quite a bit and still understand the meaning of what someone is saying. For example, this morning at lunch, I only heard the waitress say the word "drink," but that's enough to understand that she was asking me what I wanted to drink. From that, I could guess that much of the other words she was saying were things like "coffee," "orange juice" etc. I don't need to *actually* hear her to know what she's saying. Just enough to guess.

I seem to have my problems in the following areas:

• Background noise seems to give me a great deal of trouble, although the type, volume, and frequency of it can be a major factor. Light conversation at a restaurant could actually be much harder for me to deal with than a loud raucous party in the same room as me. Usually, that wouldn't be the case, but depending on the acoustics and other factors, it actually can happen.
  
• Since listening tends to be an active exercise for me, if I'm not already paying attention to someone, if someone starts talking to me, chances are I'm going to miss that they're trying to talk to me.
  
• On that note, if I get at all distracted during a conversation... if my attention wavers from being on the person speaking, I'm going to lose comprehension.
  
• If someone is talking about lots of specific, detailed, or technical information such as rules for a game or software engineering principles, I need extra time to visualize what they're saying in my head. Often times, I need something visual to look at to be able to actually remember and parse what someone is saying.
  
• Fast speech, such as when someone is excited, tends to mess me up and require me to ask for repetition.
  
• Similarly, mumbled speech or speech with an unfamiliar accent both tend to mess me up.
  
• Once again, since listening is an active task for me, it can be quite exhausting and require a lot of energy. When I'm tired, I'm less able and willing to put forth that kind of energy, and my comprehension starts to drop.
  
• Group conversation is hard for me because I need to constantly shift my attention to whoever is speaking. If I don't catch the person fast enough, I'm going to miss the first few words of what they said. I've noticed that my head tends to dart around searching for who's going to speak next.
  
• If who is in the group changes, or the conversation splits off into multiple groups, or anything else happens to the conversation, I can get pretty lost. I was at a party the other weekend where I was sitting in the room having absolutely no idea what anyone was saying.
  
• If multiple people talk at once, I miss a lot. Tests and experience has shown that I actually can handle this if I try hard, but it takes a TON of effort, and I generally just don't wanna.
  
• Quiet speech is harder for me, because it doesn't raise off of the background noise floor as much. The louder speech is relative to the background noise, the better I understand it.
  
• Telephones give me trouble, but mostly when talking to someone unfamiliar about an unfamiliar topic.
  
• Topic changes are hard for me, because I have to build a new context table from which to draw ideas for filling in the gaps in my comprehension of what people are saying.
  
• My left side is worse off than my right, by 12 percentage points. People on my left side tend to be harder to understand than those on my right.
  

Again... I'm not deaf, and I'm not technically hard of hearing. I have a central auditory processing disorder, which means that my brain doesn't handle incoming sound as effectively as a neurotypical person. However, the term "hard of hearing" seems to be a fairly accurate description for a person like myself that experiences intermittent and inconsistent hearing problems.

Based on how bad my problems can get and using category descriptions from here, I generally fit within the category of "mild bilateral hearing loss" in terms of personal experiences. However, at times, in certain circumstances, my behavior can vary in either direction. Some situations, I hear and comprehend perfectly as if I had no problem at all. Other times, I could be described as having what would be called "moderate hearing loss."

In any case, the sensorineural and conductive hearing in my ear actually tests a little above average, so my hearing seems just fine. It's what I do with that audio once it gets past my ears and heads into the brian that I have problems.

It's hard to clearly indicate how bad my problems can get, since these levels are for people with sensorineural/conductive hearing loss. For someone like myself, it's a lot harder to categorize me. However, I think that I spend most of my life in the "mild" category. I think that explains why I haven't had much impact from this in my life in terms of school and work. For whatever reason, the particular characteristics of my CAPD seems to have resulted in stunted social development. I was fine academically and career-wise. I've just struggled more socially than most other folks.

I'm taking steps to untrain myself out of my habit of playing "the guessing game" with people. Although it's nice to make other people feel better by pretending to have heard them, I've decided that it is better to *actually* understand people, and as a result, ask people to repeat themselves more often. Some people appreciate it. Others find it annoying. But it is helping increase my comprehension, in any case. :)

I think the reason this whole thing has had me so freaked out and anxious is the fact that it is so important to me... I've been trying to explain my social difficulties for years. I've tried a variety of explanations, ranging from the esoteric ("I'm a special child of god/angel/whatever") to the psychological ("I probably have asperger's syndrome") to whatever. With the discovery of confirmed CAPD, I feel that I've finally found the *real* answer to the question of why I have what social problems I have.

Of course, by the same token, it's a bit weird and freaky to discover that I've been living with a mild hearing problem my whole life. All these words suddenly apply to me: I'm "hard of hearing" by some people's standards. I have a legally recognized "hearing disability." I am "hearing impaired." I have legal protections under the ADA. It's all like... Woah.

I think, after processing a lot of all of this, I feel a lot more comfortable with this new understanding of myself. I also had to have a little cry as I realized that I really couldn't hear/understand people in some situations. It was today at lunch when I couldn't understand the waitress. It was then that I realized just how little I understand sometimes, and I had to cry for what I experienced as a "loss," even though I've had these sorts of problems all my life.