DHH Infusion
Not the Whole Story
by Asha Federico
“What are those things in your ears?” I was seven years old, and this was my favorite question.
“My hearing aids!” I would announce, like I’d just been called on after knowing the answer all along.
Children are wonderfully efficient conversationalists. They notice something unusual, insist on an explanation, then, having received one, return to whatever mattered five seconds earlier. My hearing aids inspired dozens of these exchanges. One minute I was explaining earmolds and audiologists; the next I was back on the playground pretending the monkey bars were a pirate ship.
Adults are much stranger.
By the time I arrived at college, people rarely asked about my hearing aids directly. Instead, their eyes performed a small choreography: glance at the bright blue molds in my ears, look away, glance back, wonder whether it was polite to ask. I found this strange because, for most of my life, my hearing aids had belonged in the same category as toothbrushes, shoelaces, and socks: things I used every day and therefore never thought about. I put them in when I woke up. I took them out before bed. Between those two moments, life happened. It had never occurred to me that everyone else might be looking at them more closely than I was.
Before long, their curiosity became my own. My friend Kai asked me whether, given the choice, I would have ever gotten hearing aids in the first place. At first, the answer seemed obvious.
Yes.
I like hearing lectures. I like music. I like overhearing snippets of conversation while walking through Berkeley. But the longer I sat with the question, the less obvious my answer became. There was something unsettling about how easily I wanted to choose hearing. It implied a hierarchy I didn’t believe in. My hearing loss had never felt like a wall separating me from the world. More often, it felt like a doorway between two rooms. The trouble was that college kept changing which room I thought I was standing in.
As a member of a campus club called Down Syndrome Community Outreach, one of the more memorable parts of my freshman year was organizing a prom for adults with disabilities. On the evening of the event, while volunteers moved between folding tables and balloon arches, the coordinator hurried down the line asking the same question over and over.
“Who knows ASL? Who knows ASL?”
I felt an immediate urge to raise my hand. Not because I know ASL. I don’t. But the question seemed addressed to me anyway. The bright blue molds in my ears had spent nineteen years announcing that I belonged to the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Standing there, I found myself expecting them to serve as credentials. But the coordinator moved past me without hesitation. She wasn’t wrong. She needed volunteers who knew ASL, and I wasn’t one of them.
Still, I watched her continue down the line, surprised by the disappointment I felt when my hearing aids no longer seemed to say what I thought they did. As a child, the line between hearing and deaf seemed obvious. Hearing aids existed to help me cross it. Now, I found myself standing on the border, looking in both directions, uncertain whether crossing was the same thing as belonging.
Meanwhile, my friends seemed to have settled the matter already. One night, a group of us had gathered to do homework when Kai arrived and decided our study session needed a soundtrack. He launched into a full-throated rendition of “Suddenly, Seymour” from Little Shop of Horrors. After a few minutes, one of my friends looked at me. “If I were you,” she said, “I’d take out my hearing aids right about now.”
I laughed and nodded as Kai shot us all a look that promised retaliation. There was a particular kind of acceptance that arrived in that moment, when my hearing status stopped being treated as either tragedy or inspiration and simply took its place alongside everything else we joked about.
As the year went on, I began finding language for experiences that had always existed just below the surface of my awareness: listening fatigue, the relief of removing my hearing aids after a long day, the comfort of silence. My audiologist had talked to me about these things since I was a toddler. My parents had noticed them too. But when a way of moving through the world is all you’ve ever known, it rarely occurs to you to examine it.
Around the same time, I noticed that a particular comment had begun bothering me.
“Well, you’re basically hearing.”
I knew people meant it kindly. What they meant was: you fit in here. What I heard was: I don’t see the effort. Not the effort of overcoming hearing loss, but the effort of translation. Of asking someone to repeat a joke for the fifth time. Of piecing together conversations in crowded dining halls. Of spending my days in one world and my nights in another.
Every evening, I start to remove my hearing aids. A door closes somewhere down the hall. Someone laughs. Water rushes through a shower pipe.
Then nothing. The world of sound disappears.
As a child, I thought this silence was merely the absence of sound. Now, I think it’s evidence of something else. It reminds me that I have spent my entire life moving between worlds so naturally that I never noticed I was moving at all. The hearing world has shaped me. The deaf and hard-of-hearing world has shaped me too. Neither tells the whole story.
When I was seven years old, I loved being asked about my hearing aids because I always knew the answer. After my first year of college, I find that I love them for a different reason. They’ve become less a piece of technology than a way of asking who I am.
And for the first time, I think I’m beginning to enjoy the question as much as I once enjoyed the answer.
Federico grew up in Colorado and her parents were involved in Colorado Hands & Voices. ~
H&V Communicator – Fall 2026