Hearing Loss LIVE! Talks with Liza Sylvestre

Michele Linder of Hearing Loss LIVE! first met hard of hearing artist, Liza Sylvestre at Liza's immersive art show in Minnesota.  Last week's blog takes you on Michele's journey of how inclusivity can truly happen.

We sat down with Liza and talked art, hearing loss and family. She is current a professor at University of Illinois and working on a new art showing in England. You can see her full works at www.lizasyvestre.com

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Transcript

Hearing Loss Live Talks with hard of hearing artist, Liza Sylvestre.
Julia: Hello. Welcome to Hearing Loss Live. Glad you could join us today. This week's blog and podcast, we have invited Liza Sylvestre, an inclusive artist with the hearing loss to talk about her artwork and her hearing loss and her family and all sorts of things. She is one of our favorites because she lives her life. She's not afraid to talk to people about her hearing loss and how it visually affects her as well.

She has some great immersive programs. I'll let her go into that, but I want to say, as a hearing person, Liza has a poem on her website that goes through what sounds she misses with her hearing loss. And I think anybody who works with people with a hearing loss, has friends or family with a hearing loss, go to lizasylvestre.com and listen to that poem because it is an eye-opener.

I know it was for me. It really helped me understand better hearing loss and how it kind of works. I don't have a hearing loss, so I can't say I know it, how that always works because it's different for everybody. But I would like to introduce you to Liza Sylvestre from Minnesota. Liza, go ahead and take it over and tell us all about yourself.
Liza: So, thanks so much, Julia. And I am originally from Minnesota, which is where I had the great pleasure of meeting Michele, but I currently live in Champagne, Illinois. I work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Thank you so much for having me here. I can maybe just give you a brief introduction and talk about the specific video that you mentioned, Julia. I'm a multidisciplinary artist. I grew up losing my hearing progressively. It was profound at a young age and then I received a cochlear implant in 2003. My hearing loss is actually the result of an immune system disorder. So I've had other immune system related things that have come up more recently.

And actually interestingly enough while we get into talking about family, I lost the last of my hearing in my unimplanted ear when I was pregnant with my child in 2016, so 2015, 2016. And so that's a little history of my hearing loss. I definitely think it's important to acknowledge when we're talking about hearing loss, and especially when it comes to talking about cochlear implants or transpositional hearing aids, that is very complicated.

And I think they're often seen as a fix or a solution to a problem. And I know in a very lived, informed experience that that's not true. Sometimes I can hear very well and then other times just moments later, I can't hear it all. And that's the shift that makes it ever complicated. It's sort of akin to trying to stand in quick stand where you're ... That didn't translate well. I said quick sand. Did I do it this time? Quick sand, quick sand. I'm looking at the captions and becoming amused by the inability to capture what I'm saying.

So I think a lot of that instability has informed or driven my art practice. So I'm trying to find meaning. I'm trying to give some stability to an otherwise very unstable situation and way of going through the world. And so the video that you mentioned, Julia, is a video I made actually while I was pregnant with my kid. So it's just an interesting thing to think about.
And before making that video, I was primarily a painter and a drawer. And I felt frustrated by the limitations of what I could share with a painting and a drawing. And I knew that I wanted to make work that was engaging my particular way of being in the world more. And so I would get these ideas for making videos, for making experiences, I guess you could say. And that video was the very first one that I put together.

And I think in looking back, I wanted to quantify what my hearing loss is. I think the burden of explaining what we don't have access to is a really interesting question. I don't know what I'm not aware of. I know what I'm aware of. And so when I'm asked to define what I don't have access to, it becomes this really ephemeral slippery space that I think is actually really interesting and generative and complicated.

So that video I'm reciting something that I wrote. And the first iteration of me reciting that writing, I'm pronouncing everything in the way that I pronounce things through my accents of hearing loss, years of speech therapy. I think at that time, 33 years of living with the hearing loss that I had and being mostly in the hearing world and mainstream.

And so I'm pronouncing it through that lens. My voice becomes material, what I'm saying becomes material. And then the second iteration, I decided to train my speech patterns to mimic the sounds of words as they exist without the parts of them that I don't have access to. So the word boombox transforms into [oomba 00:07:14].

And so I created a new sort of speech and essentially I'm saying the same thing twice, but in two very different ways. And the emotions that that sort of physical recognition of going through the process of doing that, of realizing that the distance between those two things is also a material in that video. Yeah, I think I'll pause there.

Yeah, go ahead, Chelle.
Chelle: I was just thinking, as you were talking about that, how much I just liked watching videos and the captions, how I just almost totally stayed away from anything caption, but you created your art with it. Like here at Hearing Loss Live, we do short videos and we do memes. Memes, yay. But when they said short videos, I was like, "Ah." But now, if we give it access, it's fine.

And so I love that you took something that was so frustrating. It made it like awareness and art.
Liza: Thank you. It's nice of you to say. And Michele, I saw your hand up.
Michele: I just wanted to say that that video that you made where you're reciting your writing, I think it was called, what if I hold you a story in a language I can hear, or I can't hear. And I found out about you from a fellow Minnesotan who sent me an email with your newsletter in it. And that video just caught my eye, and I watched it. And there were no captions, and I can't hear the audio and I could lipread you so well.

And so that's how Liza and I met. I sent her an email saying, "Do you have a caption version of this video? I think I know everything you said, and I transcribed it all." And she wrote me back and she said, "I don't have that, but I will get one for you very soon." And she did. And she was amazed at how much I got right.

But that's one thing that is such a strong connection between Liza and me. I think we grew up very much in a similar way with losing our hearing and we're kind of hardwired to lipread. And when we connect with other people who have had that same experience, it's almost like a siblinghood. It's almost like we recognize one another and we feel really connected.

And I'm so glad that that friend sent me that email with your newsletter because Liza and I have exchanged emails back and forth for years. And I was lucky enough to meet her when she was a guest at the SayWhatClub Convention when she presented a workshop. So I just love that video. And actually Chelle and I used that video in an oral transliteration workshop. We gave to sign language interpreters who were trying to provide oral transliteration for lipreaders. And it was very helpful tool to use in that workshop that we did. So I thank you for that. I just think everything you do is just so wonderful.
Liza: You're boosting my ego today. Thank you. And it is true, Michele, what you say about the siblinghood, the sisterhood, the kinship that's shared between other people with hearing loss or deafness. I'm just so fortunate to know the people that I do that understand fundamentally what it's like and there is an instant bond.

And I think that maybe especially between people with hearing loss, who are hard of hearing, I find myself very much in between the deaf world and the hearing world. And it's a world that I sort of straddled my entire life and a whole culture exists there. And it's really beautiful and powerful to meet other people that understand that place. So your presence in my life has been a blessing over the years, Michele, and I'm so grateful to know you.

I want to go back to one thing that you said, Chelle, about the sort of wasted time of not having access to captions. And I would say that one thing that I always try to do in my artwork and what I've done specifically in my caption series where I've taken films or videos that I don't have access to because they lack captions.

And I grew up before the ADA. I'm an ADA cusp generation. So nowadays, there's many more captions to things than there were when I was growing up. So sometimes I'm using videos from the '90s when I was a kid to just bring in that the historical connections and contextualization of that experience. But one thing I do in that particular series I've made several of these videos now is I'm adding my own caption, my own commentary to the space of the captions that are lacking.

And so in that way, my in-access becomes generative. Instead of me wasting my time trying to watch a two-hour long video, I've created a whole experience and a whole narrative and a whole point of view of my subjective interpretation of that film. And sometimes I'm trying to figure out what's going on. Sometimes I'm on the mark, sometimes I'm really not. Or so I've been told. And sometimes I'm honing into the sort of visual language of things, and what it's telling me, and what I'm able to see in that language that maybe people who are more conditioned by their hearing ability and their access to film just through sound or hearing. It's not as in focus for them.

And so I've always kind of explained this special ability we had as people with hearing loss, in this way. And let me know if you're following me here, but I find myself at a play. And instead of sitting in the front row seat of the play, I'm actually in that area at the side of the play, kind of being blocks from view behind those velvet curtains. And I'm not watching the play front on from the front seats like the rest of the audience is. I'm watching it from there, from the side.

And so from that point of view, I can observe the audience and learn from their reaction of the play, what the play is about. I can watch the play from the side and see what it's about, but I can also watch the actors and actresses that come off the stage, and I can see all the chaos and commotions of what happens to make the play possible. And I feel like that's sort of my go-to analogy of what you gain through hearing loss.

You don't gain full understanding of what's being said, but the silver lining of it is you understand communication in a more complicated, all-encompassing way. You understand connections between people in a really different way. And we never talk about the generative, amazing potential of that. And I guess that's what I try to maybe hint at in my artwork and through my artwork in different capacities, but also why meeting other people with a hearing loss is such an enormous blessing because they get it.
Chelle: This is Chelle. That reminds me of an experience I had with my husband who's hearing, when we went to Burning Man together, because Burning Man is incredibly noisy. But to me, it's just ... I don't know, it's there but there's nothing really distinct about it unless I go and stand up to these wall of speakers and I get the music going. But there was lifeguards, about 10 guys dressed as lifeguards in little red shorts and their white shirt and they're running around and I'm like, "God, they look so happy. And that looks like so much fun."

But my husband is holding his ears, "Oh my god, I got to get away," because they were blowing their whistles. And I had no idea. So all that noise, I think he's distracted with it. And I think we tend to be more observant because it's not distracting us so much. He didn't even realize they were lifeguards. He just knew they had whistles.
Liza: Absolutely. I've never been to Burning Man, but I've been in similar iterations of that experience for sure.
Chelle: One more thing, and then Julia can go. And I was just thinking with off the mark and how we make up things too and how sometimes we have it and sometimes we don't. I know there's some songs that I think are just awesome just by the way the music is. And I can't understand the lyrics or anything. And one of those songs is Peace Frog by The Doors. I thought it was just this happy song. And then I found out it was about blood in the streets and I was like, "What?" It just blew my mind.
Liza: But isn't it interesting? At the end of the day, your experience was your experience, right? That song is about happiness for you. And there's something kind of beautiful about letting that experience be what it is without the judgment. I think that's the conditioning that we're always grappling with is like, "Okay, we can't have our own experience. We're supposed to be having this experience that we don't fully have access to."

And so I say have that experience of that Door's song about blood [inaudible 00:18:33]. The world would be a better place because of it truly, if we all just sort of accepted that.
Julia: I know you and Michele met at one of your art showings that was about immersive art. Am I saying that correctly? I'm not sure I am. I want a teeny bit on how you kind of that thought process, that artistic thought process and how it evolved into inclusivity of everybody. It's kind of the takeaway I get when I read Michele's blog about it. Can you give me some background and then maybe a little, before we leave, I want to know more about the work you're doing right now and getting ready-
Liza: So Michele and I met, and then I think we talked a few times over email and then I was gearing up to do this residency at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis that's affiliated with the University of Minnesota. And my job was to sort of insert myself into this sensory lab that they have at the University of Minnesota. It's like a group of multi-sensory scientists studying really different and diverse aspects of sensory loss.

So, some of them are training to be audiologists. Some of them are looking at the cognitive experience of sensory loss. Some of them are hearing aid engineers, working at the forefront of hearing aid technology and sound technology in that way. Others are working with perceptual psychology and blindness. Others were looking at old age and hearing loss and isolation. And then there's a whole another group of them that we're studying haptics and all sorts of different ...

They still continue to have a lot of amazing things happening at that lab, which is called CATTS, C-A-T-T-S at the University of Minnesota. You can look it up. They've got a pretty cool website and a newsletter themselves.

So my job was to sort of insert myself in the presence of these scientists, which was wild for me. And I felt pretty out of my depth maybe. But it was such an amazing experience because I just got to have all of these conversations with people and I'm coming from a really different approach to a lot of their research. And so we had a lot of overlap, but from really disparate directions. It's kind of like coming in the front door and coming, I don't know, up from the basement or something to the same content essentially.

So I got to meet all of these amazing scientists, learned about what they were doing and also got to kind of interrogate them and ask them questions. I wanted to know why they were interested in this particular niche in science. And did they have a relationship to disability? What was the connection? And what stood out to me and became really apparent to me is that, when a group of a hundred scientists studying sensory loss in different capacities, only three of them had sensory loss themselves.

And so I've had a lot of conversations about what our criteria is as people with disabilities and how that might be different from the criteria of a scientist without a disability, and how that affects research and affects decisions in the lab, affects technology advances, et cetera, et cetera. It has a big impact, that criteria list. For example, if you talk to the hearing aid engineers, many of them come from music backgrounds, and they're sort of nerds thinking about soundscapes and speaker technology. And they're really interested in these things.
Liza:
But they're their approach to this interest and their information and why they're hooked in hearing aid technology is so different from mine. They're coming from music. Their criteria list of how they approach their studies is about things that engage hearing. And so my criteria list is, I don't care about the quality of that sound. I just want to know where it's coming from, for example. There can be huge gulfs in between these criteria lists.
Liza:
Sometimes they can be closer together. And I'm not saying that we should not have people interested in music, developing hearing aids. I'm saying that we need more people with hearing loss and with actual lived experience as scientists making some of these decisions. And so after working with these scientists for three months and meetings and talking to people and learning of these stuff and meeting new people, my job was to basically come up with an event based on what I felt these scientists needed.
Liza:
And so I decided, first of all, let's put everybody in a museum space. We had this museum space, but also that feeling that I had like, "Oh god, I'm in a science lab. I don't know what I'm doing here." I wanted those scientists to feel like that to a certain extent. I needed to kind of shake up their familiarity with the subject to see if that could be generative, that could teach them something.
Liza:
And then I also was like we need to make sure these scientists are speaking with, engaging with people that actually have sensory loss. And I want them to do it outside of the lab. I want them to do it in an equitable way. And so what does that look like and how can art participate in some formation of that relationship? There's this hierarchy involved always when we're talking about the disabled subject and the scientist or the doctor. It's like the doctor and the scientist are up here and the person with hearing loss or disability is the subject being studied. It never seems to be inversed.
Liza:
So, I was trying to figure out how we could get things more here rather than here. And so my idea was pretty simple. I wanted to put people into groups. And so I created, I think it was seven different groups. And each of these groups, their task was to go around to different spots in the Weisman Art Museum and talk about their experience of the artwork.
Liza:
And each group was sort of carefully crafted by me. I put two different scientists in each group from two different facets of that particular lab. Maybe one of them was an audiologist and one of them was studying perceptual psychology. And then I put one person with a hearing loss or deafness and one person with vision loss of blindness in that group, and then I put one artist in each group.
Liza:
So, we're talking about art from these really different approaches to talking about art. And the task of the group, I didn't give any accessibility accommodations. We did not have ASL interpreters on these tours. We did not have people creating verbal descriptions for those with vision loss or blindness. We just had each other in the group.

And so a lot of my prompts were around discussing the art, describing the art, but also what are you doing as a group to make sure everyone is included. And everyone has access not only to the artwork but also to your conversation about the artwork. And then at the end, we got together in a big group and had a discussion. But that was that Sensory Loss Symposium that I called it in a nutshell.

And do we still have ... Go ahead, Michele.
Michele: Were you finished if you had more to say about that-
Liza: No, I'm definitely finished. I just know that I gave a long-winded, yeah.
Michele: Liza invited me to participate and I was very scared beforehand. And Liza will say that she feels out of her depth than vulnerable, and I'm sure she does but she doesn't look like she does. She comes across as very confident and you would never know that she's feeling out of her depth.

But that experience was such a great experience. I learned so much by being a participant and being in a mixed group of people in an art museum. And one of the coolest things was to see how everyone, especially the hearing members of the group, the scientists, the artists, to watch them try to come up with ways to include those of us who had a sensory loss.

Also, I was the only person with hearing loss in my group. There was a blind woman with a service dog, and we both were very focused on each other and what each other needed. We were very considerate of each other. And I think it highlighted the extra skill that we have in the areas that having a sensory loss teaches you to be stronger in some areas when you can't hear or you can't see.

And so we kind of added the detail that the hearing people would give detail, but we actually gave greater detail in describing what we were seeing or what we were hearing. It was just so cool to see, to put hearing people and abled people, which I know a lot of people don't like that term, to put them in charge or to include them in coming up with a solution, actually made it much more powerful. And it was just such a great experience.

One of the exhibits had an audio aspect to it. It was an apartment and you walked into the living room in the apartment, and then you exited through the apartment's door into the hallway. And then there were six apartment doors, three on either side. As you walk down the hallway, the ceiling got lower, the hallway got narrow and it was very dimly lit. And you were supposed to listen at the door and try to figure out what was happening behind the door.

And of course, everybody looked at me. I couldn't even lip read people because the light was so dim. And so they all kind of looked at me knowing that I couldn't hear anything behind the door. And they felt the wall and the door to find a place where the vibration was strongest. And they would take my hands physically, steer me and take my hands and put them where the vibration was strong for me to try to get a sense of what was happening behind the door. And I think I got four out of six right, which was interesting because I was testing the neurosensory wristband which is a haptic wristband.

And some of the same things happening behind the doors were happening with the wristband. We had to do little exercises and little games every day. It would be a person crying, a dog barking, people arguing, a radio broadcast. So that really helped me to guess what was going on behind the door, and it was just such a really cool experience.

The last thing Liza and I discussed afterwards, I think we give too little value to becoming comfortable with who you are without hearing or without sight. We want hearing aids and cochlear implants to fix us. Of course, I've never worn hearing aids because I have severe hyperacusis. I can't tolerate the volume, so I never had anything to fix me.

So I had the benefit of becoming really comfortable with who I am and not being able to hear. And I think people undervalue that, and Liza and I talked about that a little bit and how that skill of being able to navigate the world without any kind of technology is a really valuable thing.
Liza: Yeah. I remember that conversation we had, Michele. And actually, it continues to come up in my life. I recently got a new cochlear implant processor, and it's only the third that I've gotten since my implantation in 2003. And so I have really mixed feelings about it.

At several times throughout the process of getting the cochlear implant processor, dealing with advanced bionics and the actual absolute ableism of that company, the difficulty in communication with them, I almost decided to not renew my connection to my cochlear implant and to truly live as a completely deaf person because it is taxing. It is absolutely taxing.

And I don't think we acknowledge often enough how much of a burden it is to, well, first of all, straddle these worlds between hearing loss and deafness but to the upkeep and the cost and the medical intervention and the trauma that goes with that. Even making an appointment with my audiologist requires me to call on the phone. And at the end of the day, those are traumas and we need to stop pretending that they're not.

The words could be different. I should be able to email my audiologist to make an appointment, and I tried to. So, I just want to also, I don't know, give a tiny little bit of space for the absolute exhaustion and burden of being a person with hearing loss and everything that that involves whether that's learning how to pronounce something correctly or, I don't know, being in a position of authority, trying to parent a kid that is smart enough now that understands they can take advantage in particular ways, or I don't hear certain things and my husband does. And that is not a harmonious balance as all parenting is not.

But it's really complicated. And also, this burden of communication cannot just be mine. It needs to also be my child's. It needs to also be those I communicate with, my job. I can't do it alone. I literally cannot. And so I see people nodding heads, and I think that's something that people understand when they have hearing loss.
Chelle: This is Chelle. I tell people, if you don't do your part, I can't do my part. So, it is a two-way street and both people have to put into the communication effort to make it work when there's a hearing loss. And that is so taxing sometimes.
Liza: Well, the pandemic has absolutely eliminated my ability to lip read. So now going to the grocery store is a really different experience than it was pre-pandemic. And I need to wear a mask to keep my community safe, but I cannot communicate this way. So, I'm rethinking a lot of things right now and trying to figure out who am I hearing for?

This is a question that a friend of mine who's a curator in England asked. It's like, "Well, who am I hearing for? Am I hearing for my family? Am I hearing for my son? Am I hearing from myself? Am I hearing for the world? Who am I doing this for?" I think that we need to give up self-permission to answer that question. If we're hearing for ourselves, that's great. Keep hearing for yourselves. If you're hearing for everyone else, what can we change to?

I don't know, had it be a little bit easier.
Julia: Liza, that's a really, really great question. I think that has so many in-depths and we'll hopefully get our viewers to think a little bit about that because mask is a way of life, I think, for the future. Especially in the winter months, I don't know that that's going to change anytime soon. Can you tell us a little bit about what you're working on now?
Liza: Oh, yeah. So I'll try to be a little brief at least. It's related to this conversation we're having. I was fortunate enough to get a Joan Mitchell Fellowship this year, which is it's actually a five-year fellowship, which is amazing. But that's supporting me working on this exhibition that will be at the John Hansard Gallery. I'm looking to see ... That's not how you spell it. It's J-O-H-N and then Hansard is H-A-N-S-A-R-D. It's so off, but I'll share it with you in the chat or something afterwards, John Hansard Gallery at the University of Southampton in England.

So this is, first of all, a big space. I'm so fortunate to work with the curator there. Her name is Sarah Hayden. Hi, Sarah. She's amazing. She comes to access through poetry and creative writing. So, she and I have just a lot in common around how we think it's productive to have these conversations in public, in the art sphere.

There's a lot of tokenization that's happening in the art world right now of people with disabilities. And so I think that this work needs to be done in really specific ways. And Sarah is a really good person to have on your side when you're doing that.

But the work that I'm working on right now, and so I'm creating a video that's kind of the next generation of my captions films. So I'm trying to integrate into the process of making the film to access, so considering access from conception rather than after the artwork is completed. So how to do audio descriptions or verbal descriptions, how can that become an artwork? How can the captions become an artwork?

And so the video, it's an alteration of a video that I grew up watching. So again, it's this lineage of my history, a nod to my particular time in this context of the ADA and access and disability, which is this video is the movie Sweet Sea, which is about a little girl who's a mermaid and she lives with her parents under the water. And I had this Sweet Sea doll as a child. And I remember this Sweet Sea doll being with me in really particular moments that were traumatic as a kid.

And then thinking about the little me that experienced that film and was so in love with that film and I had more hearing then. So I'm thinking about that film and my recollection of that film as someone with more hearing than I have now, with different hearing than I have now because I process everything through my cochlear implant now. But also what happens to us as we age and we get older and our experiences.

So, it's looking back at my memory of that film and the senses that inform that memory that are not present for me in the same way anymore. But it's also thinking about the magic of being a child and experiencing a film. And so I'm also bringing my own child in and I'm talking to them about the film. And so my description of my storytelling is sort of connecting those two experiences. I'm now a mother. I'm not a child anymore but we're engaging this archive of my childhood and a bunch of other people's childhoods too.

But I'm focusing on mine in particular to both visually and audibly describe this film so that it's accessible to people with vision loss and blindness. But it's also a connection between the past and the present, I'm telling the story to my kid. And then their voice and their interpretation and what they pick up upon their subjective experience is also coming into the film.

So it's a family project where also all this time at home with the pandemic had been exhausting, of course, but it's also been so interesting to just see the materials of everything altogether. So it's like my artwork and my professional life and my Legos all on the same table.

And so trying to use that in a really practical, lived experience sort of way, I'm looking at these Legos and I'm looking at these instruction booklets for the Legos. And I'm thinking about how interesting it is to have these instructions to make something. And then I'm giving my cochlear implant and it has the same almost eerily set of instructions like this is how you turn it on, this is who you call, this is what goes in there.

And so I'm looking at the similarities and these instruction booklets, and also like the actual sizes and the materials of the things. So we're also creating these Legos that are part cochlear implant, part Lego. And I'm going to make these sculptures with my kid. And that's going to be one aspect of the larger than life, immersive Lego experiences that are part cochlear implant.

And so, yeah, and thinking about this, how access can be integrated into artwork rather than separate from it is a big thing I'm thinking about right now. And I think so often we had this normative experience. And then we have this sort of extension for people that need it, but it's not given a lot of focus. And at the end of the day, it's really not a very good experience to have this little extension.

So I'm thinking more and more about, and I'm doing this also at the university where I work and teach, how can we get people to be excited about access and how that can really inform and shift art making so that at the end of the day, it's not just the burden of the museum to create access, that's not really cutting it at the end of the day. It's more integrated into everything that we're doing.

So that's what I'm working on. There's a lot to do. The show will open in October in England and I'm pretty excited about it.
Julia: Wow. That's great. I think we need to go to England and do a podcast there for Hearing Loss Live. Put that on October book. I want to thank Liza Sylvestre for joining us today. When we finish these podcasts with guests, we always say, "Oh my gosh, that was my favorite podcast." And I'm going to have to say, I think this is my favorite podcast so far, so I'm really excited for it.

Thank you for sharing with us, not only on a personal level, your art, your business on level as an artist. You're amazing, Liza. You are one of our favorites, to be honest. So thank you for joining us. Do the girls have anything else they want to say? Chelle?
Chelle: Just real quick that she is an inspiration. And I did see her workshop at the SayWhatClub Convention in St. Paul, and I loved it. And her website, check out her website. She has an awesome way of making hearing loss visual so you can see it.
Liza: Thank you so much.
Michele: I just wanted to say really quick, how much I've learned from Liza. And she's the age of my children, but I actually looked to ... Well, I seem to connect with a lot of younger people because I think maybe my experience with hearing loss was delayed because I didn't really own it for so long. And so I almost feel like I connect with younger people because I'm kind of still learning, and Liza has been very helpful to me to move forward and to think about hearing loss in a different way.

And I think we're kind of like thinkers, where we analyze things. We're very analytical, very introspective about our childhood experiences and as adults. And she just really has taught me a lot and I'm so appreciative of her. I had some other things I wanted to say, but I was tearing up thinking about them. So I went a different route.
Liza: Thank you all so much for having me. It's been such an honor to know you and to have some space here on your podcast. And I want to thank all of you for the work you're doing here. It's so important and there's not enough of it. And we need more connections in this way. So thank you all for what you're doing.
Julia: Thank you, Liza.

Learn more about Liza Sylvestre at lizasylvestre.com. We'll have a link in our blog, of course, and we'll have information. Do we put them in our glossary too? Why don't I remember that? I think we have links in our glossary. Yeah, we'll write that down and make sure it's there at all so that people don't necessarily have to look in the blog, but go to our blog anyways. Don't listen to Julia.

Thank you for joining us. Next week, we talk misconceptions. There's a lot to talk about there, so we hope you join us. And, I don't know, come to our Talk About It Tuesday. I think March 1st is the next one or it might be April. As we all know, I forget titles and what month we're in quite regularly. Oh, it's the seventh? March 7th. Okay.

Thank you so much for ... It's someday. We'll figure it out and just watch our stuff and we'll let you know. How does that sound? Thank you for joining us. Have a great day. See you next week. Bye.

For more on Liza's work, visit her at www.lizasylvestre.com.