One morning in 2001, as I waited for my university lecture to start, I felt a tap on my shoulder. Looking up, I found a young woman smiling at me, clutching a notebook. I knew immediately who she was. The week before we had exchanged emails, and I’d told her I would be sitting in the front row. I always sat at the front, even if it meant sitting by myself. To the other students I probably seemed eager and studious. But the real reason was that I’m deaf and needed to lipread the lecturer.
“I’m Rosie,” the young woman said, and I shuffled along to make room for her. I spotted her hearing aids straight away. As we struck up a conversation, I remember feeling shy and awkward. Rosie was the first person I’d ever met who was my age and wore hearing aids. I have hereditary deafness, and my mother and aunts are also deaf, so hearing aids have been a part of my life since I was given my first pair as a toddler.
My mum and aunts had to wear big box-like devices in the 50s and 60s. But our deafness wasn’t something we discussed. We didn’t learn British Sign Language and often felt like we didn’t belong in either deaf or hearing worlds. At my school, I was the only person who wore hearing aids. So I was startled and fascinated to see Rosie wearing them. She tied her hair back, and didn’t try to hide them like I did.
Sitting with us was our notetaker. This was why Rosie and I had been in touch. Although we studied different subjects, we shared a statistics class, so the university asked us to share a notetaker. At the time, it had felt like an attempt to economise on my request for access provision, but I soon became grateful for the suggestion.
After the lecture, Rosie and I carried on talking. It felt completely different from the conversations I had with most other people. For one thing, she always remembered to look at me when we talked. I didn’t have to worry that, at any moment, she’d glance away, and I’d miss a joke or remark. There was an instinctive awareness between us about making communication clear and visible. Despite my shyness, I felt a huge curiosity to know more about her. I’d grown up thinking that my deafness was some kind of flaw, but here was Rosie, who was clever, wise, full of fun – and deaf. What was the big deal?
“I like university,” she told me. “But trying to lipread everything in the lectures is exhausting.” I smiled. This was something I never told anyone. Many people assumed that lipreading gave me an almost magical ability to understand what they were saying, but I had to cover up the fatigue it caused, or simply opt out of conversations when the fatigue became too much. “I feel the same,” I confessed.
From that moment on, I felt like a window had opened on my own experience as a deaf person. Partly it was the joy of being able to talk openly. We discussed noisy social events, or just regular group conversations, where we felt on the fringes. People saying: “Never mind” or: “It doesn’t matter”. The feeling of having to work twice as hard simply to keep up.
Mostly we just enjoyed student life together. We met for drinks and parties, and cooked dinners for each other. I helped Rosie prepare her campaign to become a student equality and diversity officer. We even joined the local canoeing society, setting out early on summer mornings to go and capsize (hearing aids removed) in the river. But the knowledge that I wasn’t the only deaf student at the university made the experience feel less lonely. It was a kind of kinship I hadn’t known before.
After university, our careers took us in different directions. We still found time to meet up, going to deaf yoga and captioned theatre shows. We even went travelling together. I also started learning BSL, something I wish I’d done sooner. Rosie, who had started learning it as a teenager in her mainstream school’s deaf unit, encouraged me.
We continued to share notes on being deaf. Learning to advocate for myself as a deaf person in the professional world was tough. The messages I’d absorbed as a child – that the only positive narrative society is willing to entertain about deafness and disability is the “inspirational” way in which it is “overcome” – were deeply ingrained. But Rosie was more enlightened, and she was a fierce and strong advocate for herself and others. She held up a mirror to my own experience, but also set an example for me, offering an alternative perspective.
Our friendship now spans more than two decades. I’ve learned more about deaf history, my curiosity sparked partly by what I didn’t discuss with my deaf family members, but also by everything I talked about with Rosie. She now lives abroad, working as an educational psychologist. Recently she texted me to say that she misses the deaf community back home, but that she knows deafness will always be a big part of her identity wherever she lives. “It’s in me,” she wrote, “same as it’s in you.” It’s an essential part of who we are. Twenty years on, our friendship has become an essential part of who I am as well.
