Deafness, me, and RNID
Magazine feature
“My right ear doesn’t work - never has and never will.”
As you may or may not know, I am deaf. My condition is called single-sided deafness - sometimes called unilateral hearing loss - and I’ve been fully deaf in my right ear from birth. It impacts me in many ways, but doesn’t take anything away from my life.
The opportunity
I wrote a personal blog on this topic for National Storytelling Week in 2020, as it’s an interesting topic and something not everyone knows about me. After contacting them on Twitter, I was approached by the charity organisation RNID (formerly known as Action on Hearing Loss) to develop the blog into a feature for its print magazine. The magazine is sent out to subscribers and members of RNID and supporters of the Deaf community.
The solution
I tailored my original personal blog post to better suit the audience (and also removed some swear words), submitted high-quality head shots and photographs, and it was published in February 2021. I had many readers get in touch with me to say thank you for the feature because it spoke to their own experiences of d/Deafness. RNID then shared my story through social media on Twitter and Instagram, which continued the conversation and got people talking and thinking about their relationship single-sided deafness.
Magazine feature extract
My relationship with deafness has always felt complicated. I’ve never felt ‘deaf enough’ to claim any part in the d/Deaf community as I largely ‘pass’ as a hearing person. I want to point out here I don’t support the concept of passing and I’m very aware of my hearing privilege. I don’t have hearing loss because it was never really there to lose. It’s better to describe it as a total lack of hearing in one ear. Like I said before, my left ear is fully hearing – with the added bonus of tinnitus – but you wouldn’t necessarily talk to me and ‘tell’ I’m deaf.
