Well here goes...

We have decided to commit to a CI as the only solution to the hearing loss. I knew this was the only sensible course, but I have wanted to ensure that we covered every possible cause. I'm not entirely sure we have done that, but I can't go on living in this limbo so a commitment to have a CI is a move forward.

Some people have been saying to me 'Why aren't you hungrier for the CI?' and the answer, I've come to realise, lies in my own (lack of) identification with being deaf.

I was deaf in one ear from the age of about 18 months until I began to lose hearing, slowly, in the right ear too from about 1999. From then until last year I was hearing pretty well (the odd bad day excepted) until that fateful mountain cable car. So while I have been hard of hearing for almost all of my life and mildly deaf for almost a decade, I have been certain that I am hearing person until this year.

In short a deaf identity still isn't my identity. I can't help feeling that because of this I have not been able to embrace a CI as a benefit but instead I still see it as a negation of my own 'real' identity as someone able (with a struggle) to hear, engage, interact.

What do I take away from this?

That becoming deaf is about a loss of identity as much as assuming one. That losing hearing is about losing confidence as much as (or even more than) losing touch with sound. That the heroic, but imperceptible, struggles to hear when you are hard of hearing but denying it are all the more ridiculous and pathetic in retrospect.

On that last point, I am now amazed to realise the number of devious ways by which I actually managed for years with reduced hearing and all sorts of trivial and not so trivial things are coming into sharper relief. The fact that I used to skip lectures at Cambridge because certain lecturers were 'not helpful' when what I really meant was 'the lecturer mumbled'; the fact that, when I became a lecturer myself, I talked too much and listened too little (fill the time with your voice and you don't have to strain to listen for the responses of students); the fact that I have always fought shy of social events, meetings, even the odd get-together.

What I am beginning to realise is just how far deafness is not some new condition but, paradoxically, one of the most essential elements of me, Mark. I still feel unsure whether, on those all too frequent occasions we are asked to declare - for 'diversity monitoring' purposes - whether we are disabled, I really should be ticking that box...

Bit of a surprise to learn all of that at this age.