Hearing Loss LIVE! in Five: Are you in, or out?

Are you in or out? This is a strategy to save your energy, with hearing loss. Conserving energy with hearing loss is a must. It takes a lot of energy to piece together conversation. We also have to decide whether we are in our out when it comes to self advocacy.  

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Transcript

Welcome to Hearing Loss LIVE! In Five. 

Julia: Good afternoon, and welcome to Hearing Loss LIVE! In Five. So today, we want you to like, share, subscribe and join us for one of our classes, which we'll talk about near the end. But I want to talk about are you in or are you out? month of May, we talked about resilience quite a bit. And we talked about our struggles and how we get through them. But sometimes, we have to decide, are we in or are we out? Chelle? What does that kind of look like for you with hearing loss?

Chelle: I have to decide where my energy is. How much energy I have for any particular advocacy work. Whether I'm in or out with hearing that's easy. Take my hearing aids out and I'm out. [laughter] But trying to decide whether or not the advocacy is worthy, it goes back and forth in my mind. Do I push and stand up for my rights to participate like anybody else? Or do I let it go? Because maybe I've got all these other things going on in the background of my life, and I will weigh out, and we're talking about scales here. Or I've weighed out, you know, with all this going on, do I have the energy for this? Maybe not right now, maybe not. Maybe I'll have to let that go. And then I bring it back up kind of even. And someday I hope somebody else takes it on. And another thing in advocacy is, I know local, Utahn's really were pushing for captions at the local live theater place. And they were all musicals. So there's another thing where I'm like, am I in or am I out. Musicals just aren't that important to me, and I don't enjoy them. So I had to let others who do enjoy it, take it. But at another local theater here that they don't like, you know, I can take it up over here, because it's not musicals, and I do enjoy it. So you kind of have to go with where your interest lies to make sure you have the passion to go for it, but also weigh out your energy.

Julia: That's a great description. I love that. Because when you are in, and you're all in, you can bring your hearing partners with you, and they can be in with you and help with that support. So we can't take everything on ourselves. And that's okay. And I think sometimes we feel like we should. Because everybody wants to be an included. And so when we push for that inclusion, whatever it looks like. Hearing loops, FM systems, captioning, open captioning and closed captioning, all that stuff is inclusive. And so when you're in and can and can get the support behind you, it's great. But if you have to be out, we need to be okay with that too. We have to pick battles, not necessarily on whether we can win them or not. But what the benefit and cost relation is to us. We always say hearing loss is not one size fits all. So picking your battle means you can focus more on what it is you want. And then this next person who wants this can focus on that and you can be a back support, right? You don't have to be a front person pushing it forward. You can just help disseminate the information is the best way I want to say it. We do have a great class. It's called Lipreading Strategies previously known as lipreading concepts. It is a class where we teach you about are you in or are you out and other strategies around lipreading and communication. And it's built to involve you as a hearing loss person as well as your hearing partners, friends, families, employers. We'd love to have you join one of our classes we go on after teaching strategies to two different lip shape classes that teaches you about the somewhat visible shapes because it's not all about lip shapes people and if you don't know that you need to pull up some blogs and podcasts we've got .So and then we go on to advanced lipreading, which is really super fun and it really becomes a great time. Oh, we're getting better at these. We hope you'll join us in the future check out our let's talk Tuesdays starting again in August.

Bye!