I didn’t have the heart to stop you while you were passionately talking about whatever you were talking about.

The emotions were written all over your face, so…I mimicked you.

No, I didn’t hear a word you said.

But if you smiled, I smiled.


If you seemed sad, I was sad.


If you raised your eyebrows, you better believe mine were up there, too.


Far be it from me to not be an empathetic person!

And somewhere along the way in our conversation, I figured out what I didn’t hear 5 minutes ago, and then my whole being cycled through the same emotions I faked before, only this time they were real because I finally “heard” what you said!!

Dear hearing people,


This is my life. There are more conversations of faking than I care to admit. 

I’m not faking because I don’t want to engage with you, but more so because, well, it’s hard sometimes to admit that I’m not hearing you.

It’s hard sometimes to ask you to repeat yourself for the third time, when I notice the tension in your body that tells me you would rather end this conversation than say what I didn’t hear one more time.

I can feel the exasperation you’re trying to hide sometimes, because how would it look for you to not help me hear you? 

And then when I ask you to spell that word that sounds like phone, tone, drone, lone, because I missed the context clues around it that would help me decipher the word you said, and instead of spelling, you repeat the word and carry on the conversation. And I’m left to figure out what you were talking about that I seem disconnected from you, and you feel like I’m disengaged from you.

I fake it often, because I’m tired too. 

No, it’s ok, I can tell. I know it takes a lot of work out of you to stretch a word all the way out so that I can catch the syllables to understand what you said.

I know it takes a lot of work to repeat and to rephrase your sentences to make sure that I don’t miss one word of this scintillating story.

I know you wish that you didn’t have to do all this work.

And yes, I wish you didn’t have to do it either.

But I’m working with what I got.

And I need your help to feel connected to a world that’s very easy to feel disconnected from.

Dear hearing people, you probably fake it as I do sometimes, but I know that, as ridiculous as it all sounds, we’re both trying to make each other feel seen and heard. 

But I know that to truly be seen and heard, we have to build a bridge towards each other with empathy.

I can’t promise I won’t fake it again. But I can let you know what I need so that we both have an opportunity not just to hear each other but to be understood.

Sincerely,
Antoinette