I Sometimes Forget That I Am Deaf

Most of the time, I forget that I am deaf. I obviously know I cannot hear. It is just that life is busy enough that I do not think about it every minute of every day.

I wake up and check my phone. I think about work. I make coffee and worry about something stupid. I go outside, drive, meet people, watch movies, travel. Normal life, basically. And somewhere in all of that, being deaf becomes just another fact about me, the same way my height or my name is a fact about me.

Then something reminds me. It is usually something small. Someone calls my name from another room. Someone says, "I'll just call you." Everyone laughs at something I did not hear. Someone says, "Never mind."

None of these moments are dramatic, and nobody is necessarily being rude. Most people are just living their lives. But these small moments remind me that I move through a world that was mostly built around hearing. Maybe that is the strange part of being deaf. It is not always the big things you notice. Sometimes it is the smallest ones.

Someone is calling you

The easiest way to remind me is to call my name from behind me.

"Prajwal!" Nothing. "Prajwal!" Still nothing. Then someone walks around to the front, waves a hand at me, and says, "Bro, I was calling you." I say, "Oh." They ask, "Didn't you hear me?" And the honest answer is no, I did not.

Usually we laugh about it and move on. Nobody did anything wrong. But for a second, I remember. Oh yeah. I am deaf.

It happens in small ways all the time. Someone talks to me while walking away. Someone says something from the kitchen while I am in the hall. Someone starts talking while I am looking at my laptop. Someone assumes I heard them because I nodded at the right time. I am not ignoring you. There is a very real chance that I have no idea you are talking to me at all.

"I'll just call you"

There is another thing that happens more often than you would think. Someone needs to tell me something, and I say, "Yeah, send it to me." They reply, "I'll just call you."

Please do not :)

It is not that I hate phone calls. I just cannot hear them properly, and over the years this has created some very stupid situations. Delivery people call because they cannot find the building. Cab drivers call to confirm the pickup point. A colleague wants to discuss something quickly, so they call. Some company wants to verify something, so they call. A person who has never spoken to me in their life calls because "it will be easier."

And I am sitting there, watching my phone ring, thinking that you know what would actually be easier? Texting me.

That is the funny part. The fix is so boring. You do not need some futuristic accessibility technology for this, and you do not need a new communication protocol. WhatsApp works. SMS works. Email works. A message that says "I'm downstairs" works perfectly fine.

I wrote a whole post last year about AI and live captions, and I still believe in that stuff. It helps. But most of my daily problems do not need AI. It is surprising how often accessibility problems are not caused by some impossible technical limit. A lot of the time they exist because nobody thought to give a second option.

I wrote about this a couple of years ago when I was trying to figure out what accessibility even means. I still think about it. Accessibility is not only being allowed through the door. It is being able to do the thing once you are inside.

Please do not say "never mind"

There is one sentence I have slowly learnt to hate, and it is "never mind."

It usually goes like this. I ask, "What did you say?" They say, "Nothing." I ask again. They say, "Never mind." Then everyone goes back to talking.

For the other person, that conversation is over. For me, it is not. Now I am sitting there wondering what I missed. Was it important? Was it a joke? Was it about me? Did everyone else just understand something that I did not?

Sometimes I ask a second time. Sometimes a third. And honestly, sometimes I do not want to keep asking. You get tired of saying "what?" and "sorry, can you repeat that?" and "I didn't get that." You start counting how many times you can interrupt a conversation before you become the annoying person in the room. So at some point you just stop. You smile, you nod, and you move on. Maybe I understood. Maybe I did not. Nobody else will know.

I am not fully innocent here

I should be honest about my part in this too, because it is not only other people.

When I nod without understanding, I am doing my own version of "never mind." I am telling the other person that everything is fine when it is not. They walk away thinking the message reached me. It did not. And then later, when something goes wrong because I missed it, I get annoyed at them for a problem I helped create.

There are also times I do not tell people I am deaf at all. A new colleague, someone I just met at a cafe, a cab driver. I do not always want the first thing about me to be that. So I skip it, and then I get frustrated when they call me or talk to me from across the room. That is not really fair to them. They cannot text someone they do not know needs a text.

I do not have a clean answer for this. I am still figuring out when to say it and when to let it go.

The things I miss that nobody notices

This is probably the hardest part to explain.

People usually think about the obvious things when they think about being deaf. Music, sounds, hearing someone talk. Sure, those matter. But there are smaller things I miss too, and I do not think most people ever notice them.

I miss knowing when someone is calling my name. I miss knowing that someone is walking up behind me. I miss being able to casually follow a conversation happening across the room, and being able to sit anywhere without first thinking about where everyone else is sitting. I miss not having to look at faces all the time.

It is strange to think that hearing people do all of this without thinking. You do not think about sound arriving. You do not think about where a voice is coming from. You do not check if you are facing the person properly. You just hear.

For me, a conversation often starts with a little preparation. Look at the person. Make sure I can see their face. Hope the lighting is okay. Hope they are not covering their mouth with their hand or a coffee cup. Hope they do not suddenly turn to look at their screen in the middle of a sentence. After a while this becomes normal. So normal that I forget I am doing it, until I am somewhere where I cannot.

The world is surprisingly loud

There is a contradiction here. Some days I completely forget that I am deaf, and some days the world makes it impossible to forget.

Airports, railway stations, restaurants, office meetings, hospitals, banks. Announcements, alarms, a token number being called out at a counter. Someone shouting from another room. People yelling at each other on the road, or a fight starting at the next table. I usually find out only because everyone around me has suddenly turned to look, and by then it is already halfway over. Someone turns to me and asks, "Did you hear that?" No, I did not.

I think this is what has changed in how I understand accessibility. The big problems are easy to see. A movie without subtitles. A meeting without captions. A service that only works over a phone call. Everyone agrees those are problems.

But the smaller things are everywhere, and they are so small that nobody calls them accessibility problems. A driver who will not text. A colleague who talks while looking at their monitor. Someone who walks away while still speaking. A notification that only comes as a sound. A room where everyone starts laughing before I even know what happened.

None of these are a big deal on their own, and nobody is doing any of it on purpose. But some days they all happen one after the other, and by the evening I am tired in a way that is hard to explain. I have spent the whole day a few seconds behind everyone else, catching up on things that already happened.

I do not always want to be accommodated

This might sound strange, but sometimes I do not even want people to make a big deal about accessibility.

I do not want someone to stop everything and ask, "How can we accommodate you?" in front of the whole room. Most of the time I just want the same boring interaction everyone else gets. Text me. Face me. Put captions on. Tell me what happened. That is enough.

I do not need every interaction to become a lesson about disability, and I really do not want people to feel sorry for me. Most of the time I am not thinking about being deaf. I am thinking about work, food, money, travel, whether I should go to the gym today, whether I have enough clean clothes, and whether I should buy something I absolutely do not need (I usually do).

Being deaf is a big part of my life. But it is not my whole life.

Maybe that is what accessibility is

A couple of years ago, I wrote that accessibility is bigger than just giving people access. I think I understand that a little better now.

Sometimes accessibility is not about giving someone a special experience. It is about removing the one small thing that makes the normal experience harder. For me, that can be as simple as sending a text instead of calling. Turning on captions. Facing me when you talk, and not walking away in the middle of a sentence. Not assuming I understood just because I smiled. And if I say I did not hear you, saying it again.

That is it. Nothing revolutionary.

I still forget

The funny thing is that I still forget. I forget until someone calls me from behind. I forget until a phone starts ringing. I forget until everyone laughs at something I missed, or until someone says "never mind" and goes back to their conversation.

And then I remember. I am deaf, and the world around me is not. It keeps talking, keeps making announcements, keeps ringing phones and having conversations in the next room. I have learnt to live in it. Not perfectly, and not without frustration, but well enough that most days I do not think about it.

I am not asking for a world where being deaf disappears. I do not think that is even the point. I just want a world where I do not have to think about it every time I try to do something ordinary. Where someone texts me. Where the movie has captions. Where I can ask, "What did you say?" and hear, "Sorry, I'll say it again."

Not "never mind."

I do not know if that world is close. Some days it feels closer than it used to. Some days it does not. Sometimes the thing I missed was not important, and sometimes it was. And sometimes you just want to be there for all of it.

Wriitten by a human among AI Agents