What World Do I Belong To?

28 Nov

Growing Up Deaf With a Cochlear Implant in a World That Never Imagined Me

There’s a question that has followed me my entire life. It doesn’t appear in the easy moments. It waits for the quiet ones; the hospital corridors where I sit alone with my thoughts, the crowded bars where I nod along to conversations I’m not actually in, the meetings where captions never arrive and everyone pretends that’s normal.

Where do I belong?

Because belonging isn’t just about identity; it’s about permission. And the truth is, nobody ever gave me permission to belong anywhere. The hearing world wanted me assimilated, the Deaf world wanted me authentic, and neither world stopped to ask if I wanted anything other than to finally breathe without performing.

Am I Deaf? Am I hearing? Am I somewhere in between? Or did the world build categories so rigid that someone like me was never supposed to exist in the first place?

People look at the device on my head and think they’ve solved me.

“Oh, you’ve got one of those implants...so you can hear now?”

They say it like a full stop. A conclusion. A neat ending to a story they’ve barely skimmed.

But for me? That’s not the ending. That’s the opening line.

Because what they don’t see, what they’ve never been taught to see is that having a cochlear implant doesn’t place you neatly inside a world.

It places you between them.

Between Deaf and hearing. Between expectations and reality. Between the person they want you to be and the person you actually are.

Growing up Deaf with a cochlear implant means always translating, always negotiating, always performing a version of yourself that makes other people more comfortable.

You learn early that the world rewards you for being convenient, for understanding without asking, hearing without questioning, existing without needing.

Nobody warns you about that part.
Nobody tells you that a device can connect you to sound while disconnecting you from belonging.
Nobody prepares you for the grief of realising the world celebrates your “fix” more passionately than it ever celebrated your identity.

I didn’t grow up choosing between Deaf or hearing. I grew up trying to survive a world that never imagined someone who could be both and neither at the same time.

That’s the story people forget. That’s the story they don’t hear.

And that’s exactly why I’m telling it now to put words to an experience the world still struggles to recognise.

Chapter 1: I Don’t Remember the Surgery, But I Remember the Story

I don’t remember the surgery. Not the room. Not the lights. Not the moment they changed the entire trajectory of my life without ever asking who I might become.

What I remember is the story adults built around it afterwards, delivered to me like a biography I hadn’t lived yet.

They didn’t say, “This will alter everything about how you move through the world.” They said, “It’s amazing what technology can do.”

They didn’t say, “You’ll have to work twice as hard to keep up with people who won’t meet you halfway.” They said, “You’ll be able to live a normal life now.”

Normal. A word people use when what they really mean is “close enough to what makes sense to us.”

I was too young to understand that this so-called gift came with a script and that I hadn’t been invited to write any part of it.

A script that assumed my future without knowing my voice:

The script was written by people who had never lived a day in my body. People who believed that proximity to hearing made life easier, not realising that proximity without understanding is its own kind of violence.

They believed they were opening doors, but all they did was lock me into expectations so tight that I couldn’t grow without disappointing someone.

You will go to mainstream school.
You will speak, and speak well.
You will blend in, even when it means disappearing.
You will keep up, even when you’re drowning.
You will validate every adult decision by succeeding in environments not designed for you.
You will grow into the version of Deafness they prefer; the one that doesn’t disrupt anything.

What the script never acknowledged was the quiet cost of becoming that person.

The early understanding that people loved the outcome more than the person. The pressure to perform comprehension instead of experiencing it. The awareness, even as a child, that the expectations placed on me were not neutral; they were engineered.

I was not asked whether I wanted this life. The decision was made, then framed as destiny.

And as I grew, I realised something unsettling:

everyone celebrated the story of me before I ever had the chance to understand myself.

No one talks about that part.

Because it raises a question nobody wants to answer:

Who was I allowed to become before the world decided for me?

Chapter 2: Learning to Hear Isn’t the Same as Learning to Belong

People like to imagine cochlear implants as simple switches: OFF = Deaf. ON = hearing.

It’s a story that fits neatly into how they understand disability and technology. It reassures them that every problem has a fix.

But what you actually receive isn’t hearing.

It’s a version of sound; a simulation, a thin approximation that other people mistake for fluency. It’s not enough to let you join the world fully, but it is enough for the world to hold you responsible when you can’t keep up.

My earliest memories of school aren’t about learning. They’re about studying the room.

Every interaction was an analysis:

Who is talking?
Where is the sound coming from?
What expression matches this noise?

Other children absorbed information without thinking. I pieced it together in fragments, not because I lacked intelligence, but because the input itself arrived broken. The teacher who spoke with her back to the class never wondered why I was quiet. She assumed silence meant comprehension, not calculation.

No one tells you that listening with a cochlear implant is mostly guesswork.

No one tells you that the world will hold you responsible for the limits of a machine. That adults will get irritated, teachers will get impatient, and peers will get dismissive, not at the device, not at the inaccessible environment, but at you.

You become the malfunction. You become the glitch people don’t want to accommodate.

Conversations become puzzles you solve in real time, hoping you’ve assembled the right picture. You smile when you’re unsure. You nod when you’re lost. You laugh almost on instinct, praying the moment lands correctly.

You’re not really participating. You’re performing participation.

And the better you perform, the more invisible the effort becomes which means the pressure only grows.

People assume Deafness is quiet. It isn’t. Quiet was the only time my nervous system could rest.

The real disturbance was in the noise; the distortion, the overlapping voices, the sharp edges of artificial sound that demanded attention but refused clarity. The noise was where the panic lived: everyone else sailing through conversations while I scrambled to stay afloat in currents they couldn’t even feel.

I never felt “fixed.” I felt observed. Monitored. Expected to embody a success story I hadn’t agreed to.

Adults praised me for “doing well,” not realising they were congratulating a performance built out of obligation. They didn’t see the exhaustion, because the exhaustion wasn’t the point. The performance was. As long as the illusion held, their expectations were confirmed.

Learning to hear was never the hardest part. That part was mechanical, predictable, something that followed rules.

The hard part was realising that the implant made everyone else assume I belonged and that if I didn’t, the failure would be pinned on me, not on the environment that excluded me or the systems that never adapted.

That’s the part that unsettles people when they finally hear it:

The world doesn’t ask whether you belong. It assumes you do and then holds you accountable for the mistake.

Chapter 3: The Hearing World - A Stage I Never Auditioned For

Here’s what it really means to be a Deaf person who “sounds hearing” you become the acceptable kind of Deaf.

The inspirational story. The proof that “technology works.” The one they point to so they never have to question their own design failures.

You become everyone’s favourite success story as long as you make their lives easy.

Because if I can “do well,” then they don’t have to change.

My existence becomes their excuse for maintaining every inaccessible system, every broken process, every missing caption. I am their shield; a walking justification for not fixing anything.

Teachers tell you, “You’re not like other Deaf kids... you’re so articulate.” Colleagues say, “I always forget you’re Deaf!” as if erasing your identity is praise.

People who can’t handle an unfamiliar accent expect you to understand every voice, in every room, through every layer of distortion without ever slowing down for you.

No one sees the mental gymnastics happening behind your smile:

Can I sit somewhere I can see everyone’s faces?
Will this meeting have captions? (Of course it won’t.)
If I ask “sorry, can you repeat that?” again, will they roll their eyes?
If I don’t laugh, will they think I’m rude?
If I laugh and it wasn’t a joke, will they think I’m stupid?

So you learn to perform.

Not because you want to but because the world only rewards the version of you that doesn’t inconvenience it.

You perform “fine.” You perform “coping.” You perform “grateful.”

And the cruelest part?

There’s a special kind of shame in hearing, “But you do so well!” on the same days you get home, close the door, and collapse into bed, exhausted from pretending you understood a world that never once tried to understand you.

The hearing world looks at the implant and decides the story is finished.

You’re fixed. You’re fine. You’re basically hearing now.

But you’re not.

You’re Deaf.

Just a Deaf person forced to pass an exam nobody else is sitting graded by people who don’t even know they wrote the test.

Chapter 4: The Deaf World - The Home That Could Have Been

Here’s the part I never wanted to say out loud:

I spent my whole childhood believing that one day, I’d walk into Deaf spaces and finally… belong.

No guessing. No explaining. No performing.

Just understanding. Just ease. Just home.

And sometimes, yes - Deaf spaces are exactly that.

The first place your shoulders drop. The first place you don’t have to prove anything. The first breath that feels like your own.

But sometimes? They’re where the deepest cut comes from.

Because some people see the implant and don’t see a Deaf child who survived impossible conditions. They see betrayal.

“Oh… you’re oral.” “So you can hear then.” “You’re not like us.”

You walk into Deaf rooms hoping to be held, and instead you feel like you’re being examined.

Nobody prepares you for the grief of realising that even the communities you desperately want to belong to have absorbed hearing-world narratives about what “real Deafness” looks like.

Nobody explains that some Deaf people have been so harmed by audism that they see implants not as survival tools, but as symbols of oppression and that you’ll carry the emotional fallout of that history even if you never chose it.

Do you sign well enough?
Did you learn early enough?
Are you Deaf enough?
Are you proud enough?
Are you resisting the hearing world loudly enough when the hearing world spent your entire life rewarding you for doing the opposite?

My Deaf identity never got to grow slowly, or safely.

It was interrogated. Pulled apart. Defended. Justified. Apologised for.

I was always explaining myself to hearing people, to Deaf people, to myself.

That’s the part almost nobody talks about:

You can be born Deaf and still spend your whole life trying to prove it.

Chapter 5: The Thing No One Ever Imagined - Growing Up With No Blueprint

Most people grow into identities that already exist.

A hearing child grows into a world that mirrors them everywhere: in storybooks, classrooms, TV shows, careers, leadership. They inherit a culture that was already waiting for them.

A culturally Deaf child, when supported, grows into language, community, history, pride; an identity with elders, rules, stories, humour, and belonging.

But Deaf cochlear-implant users?

We don’t grow into a world. We grow into a gap.

We were raised inside a global experiment without ethics, language, or consent. The world celebrated the technology but never studied the humans who had to live inside it.

We were the beta version; tested, measured, showcased but never fully seen.

We didn’t see our lives anywhere.

If Deaf people appeared on screen, they signed. If an implant appeared, it was framed as a miracle, a tragedy, or a plot twist; never a real, complicated human experience.

We didn’t see Deaf-with-implant adults in positions of power, leading, shaping culture, showing us what it looked like to be wholly ourselves without apology.

There was no manual for navigating:

hearing expectations you never agreed to
Deaf politics you were never prepared for
identity questions with no right answer
burnout from listening all day
loneliness no one recognised
rejection from both sides
the fear of your implant failing in the wrong moment

We had technology. We had therapy. We had professionals measuring decibels and speech scores like they were measuring success.

What we didn’t have was a cultural ancestry.

No one said: This is what it means to be like you. This is where you fit. Here’s how we survive. Here’s where you go when it hurts.

So we improvised.

We invented ourselves as we went.

We became children and elders of a new identity at the same time.

We were the experiment, the case study, the success story, the cautionary tale, and the afterthought all at once.

No one prepared us for that. Maybe no one even realised it was happening.

But we did. Because we lived it.

Chapter 6: The Border on My Head

The implant is not neutral.

It is a border I carry everywhere; visible, symbolic, politicised, misunderstood.

It decides how people treat me before I even open my mouth. It tells a story I didn’t write; a story others believe more fiercely than they believe my lived experience. And once people decide which version of me they prefer, they refuse to hear anything that contradicts it.

To hearing people, it signals: “She’s fixed. She’s one of us. We can carry on exactly as we are.”

No captions. No adjustments. No responsibility.

To some Deaf people, it signals: “She chose them. She crossed over. She’s not fully ours.”

To audiologists and surgeons, it’s a trophy of clinical success; numbers on a chart, a tick in a box, an outcome to present at conferences.

To policymakers, it’s a line in a report that justifies cutting support.

To strangers, it’s a spectacle: “How much can you actually hear?” “Is it like… robotic?” “Can you take it off?” “Do you miss silence?”

To me?

It’s a life I never got to choose, but one I had to learn to survive in.

It is access and exclusion often in the same moment.

It is opportunity and loss, gratitude and grief, bolted into my skull.

And when the battery dies?

Everything dies with it.

Suddenly, I’m exposed again; not as the polished, “inspirational,” almost-hearing version the world prefers to believe in, but as who I actually am:

Deaf. Entirely. Absolutely. Unavoidably.

The bus driver shouts instructions, and I stand still. The fire alarm vibrates through the floor; everyone else reacts before I even realise what it means. The receptionist calls my name from across the room, and I see the irritation flash across her face when I don’t respond.

In those moments, the myths fall apart:

There is no miracle cure. There is no “basically hearing.” There is no “look how normal you are now.”

There is just me. As I always was. As I’ve always known myself to be.

Deaf.

The world simply chooses...conveniently when to remember that.

Chapter 7: The Quietest Kind of Trauma

Let me be clear:

I am not traumatised by being Deaf.

Deafness is not a wound, a tragedy, or something I need to “overcome.”

The trauma comes from something else entirely.

It comes from:

being expected to understand what I physically cannot hear
being blamed when I don’t
being praised only when I perform “almost hearing” well enough
being made to feel guilty for needing adjustments that should have existed already
hearing, “But you’re fine, you don’t seem Deaf,” as if invisibility is an achievement
being treated like a broken miracle when I struggle

The trauma is:

absorbing, year after year, the idea that every misunderstanding is your fault
smiling through the fifth missed sentence in a conversation while your stomach sinks
feeling like an inconvenience for needing what everyone else gets automatically
realising that people are kinder to the version of you that pretends

It’s waking up every morning, putting on a device, and stepping into a world that expects applause for access while refusing to adjust itself in any meaningful way.

It’s going home, taking the implant off, and finally feeling the weight of everything you had to do, all day to keep other people comfortable.

People call it “listening fatigue.” Such a tidy, clinical phrase.

But the truth is far messier: It’s not fatigue. It’s erosion. A slow, daily wearing-down of self until you start questioning your own reality. It’s the psychological toll of carrying the emotional labour of two cultures, while neither culture carries you.

It’s living your entire life on hard mode while being told you should be grateful the game exists at all.

Chapter 8: The Guilt That Has No Name

There is a kind of guilt carried by cochlear-implant Deaf people that has no handbook, no warning label, no language.

It’s a guilt that sounds like this:

“If I misunderstood you, I should have tried harder.”

“If I ask you to repeat again, I’m being annoying.”

“If I need interpreters or captions, I’m difficult after everything the implant was supposed to fix.”

“If Deaf people are angry about implants, maybe I’m the problem.”

“If hearing people are tired of adjusting, maybe I’m expecting too much.”

“If I’m struggling, maybe I’ve failed the technology that was supposed to save me.”

This guilt isn’t taught directly.

And guilt is the easiest way to control someone. Guilt keeps you quiet. Guilt keeps you compliant. Guilt keeps you grateful for crumbs of access instead of demanding the full meal. Guilt is the tool that keeps the system functioning exactly as designed.

No one sits you down and explains it.

You learn it through:

sighs
jokes
eye rolls
forgotten adjustments
“never mind”
“it doesn’t matter”
inaccessible systems
professionals obsessed with data, not humanity
hearing people who love you more when you’re easy
Deaf people who trust you less when you’re not “pure enough”

It’s drip-fed into you in tiny, almost invisible doses, until one day it stops feeling external and starts feeling like your own voice.

It becomes instinct. A reflex.

You apologise before anyone gets frustrated. You shrink your needs before anyone has to accommodate them. You rehearse being low-maintenance because you’ve learned what happens when you’re not.

And here’s where it turns into something truly dangerous:

You start believing that inclusion isn’t a right; it’s a reward.

Something you have to earn by being easy, quiet, grateful, not “too Deaf,” not “too needy,” not “too much trouble.”

You start believing that the burden is yours to carry that if something goes wrong, it’s because you failed.

Not the system. Not the design. Not the environment.

You.

But here is the truth the world should have told you from the beginning:

You were never the problem. The systems were. The expectations were. The people who didn’t adjust were. The world that refused to imagine you was.

No one told you that. You had to survive long enough to figure it out alone.

And the hardest part? Some people never do.

Chapter 9: The Truth Even Academia Hasn’t Caught Up With

We have research on Deaf culture. We have research on hearing people’s attitudes. We have research on cochlear implants as devices, as outcomes, as charts.

But what we don’t have, what barely exists is research that centres the people who grew up in the no-man’s-land in between.

Where is the research on:

the identity crisis of Deaf-with-implant adults
the long-term psychological impact of growing up culturally displaced
the social cost of being pushed out of both Deaf and hearing spaces
the experience of being “first generation” in an identity with no elders, no history, no map
the effects of never seeing your reality represented anywhere; not on screens, not in classrooms, not in community, not in data

Most studies stop at the same lazy finish line:

“Improved speech perception scores.”

“Better integration into mainstream settings.”

They measure our ability to perform for hearing norms, but never our ability to flourish as ourselves. They track decibels but ignore dignity. They publish papers on speech scores while young Deaf people sit alone in bedrooms wondering why they feel broken by a life they never chose.

But who is asking the real questions?

Are they lonely? Do they know where they belong? Do they grow up ashamed of parts of themselves they never chose? Do they feel safe in either world? Do they have a language; any language to describe who they are?

For many of us, the answer is simple and devastating:

No. Not yet.

Because what we’re carrying isn’t just confusion; it’s grief.

The grief of growing up without a blueprint. The grief of having no cultural ancestry to step into. The grief of being told two conflicting stories about who you should be and finding that neither one fits.

You become a shape-shifter. A border-walker. A translator of worlds that don’t speak to each other.

In Deaf spaces, you monitor your speech, terrified you sound “too hearing.” In hearing spaces, you monitor your voice, terrified you sound “too Deaf.”

In both spaces, you’re performing.

Softening edges. Switching codes. Adjusting yourself to be less of a problem.

You don’t belong fully anywhere.

You belong in the gap that unclaimed, unstudied, unnamed space that no community, no institution, no researcher built a home for.

And nobody teaches you how to survive there.

That is the heartbreak. The identity wound that hides under your skin. The quiet grief that sits in your chest even on the days you seem confident, articulate, “successful,” “integrated.”

Academia hasn’t caught up. Policy hasn’t caught up. The hearing world doesn’t see it. The Deaf world doesn’t always recognise it.

But we do. Because we’ve lived every moment of it.

And until someone names this reality, studies it, centres it; we remain the generation forced to carry an identity the world never imagined, and never researched, and never made space for.

Chapter 10: There Is No One Way to Be Deaf – But There Are a Thousand Ways to Feel Unseen

People love simple stories. Binary boxes. Clean labels.

In their version of the world, you’re either:

proudly, capital-D Deaf - signing, rooted in community, culturally anchored or
“fixed” by technology - seamlessly absorbed into the hearing majority, problem solved

But where does that leave the rest of us; the millions of us who live in the complicated, messy middle the world refuses to imagine?

What about the people who:

sign slowly but feel something settle in their chest when they do
speak fluently but still miss half of what’s said
feel at home in Deaf culture but guilty for not growing up inside it
survive in hearing culture but never stop bracing for the next misunderstanding
take the implant off and feel their whole body exhale
put it back on and feel connection and exhaustion at the same time

Where do we fit?

We live in a world that wants us simplified because our complexity exposes the limits of everyone else’s imagination. We are the evidence that all their categories are too small. Our existence is a disruption and instead of expanding the category, they try to shrink us to fit.

We’re told to choose a side. Told to simplify. Told to make ourselves easier to understand.

But we are not simple. We never were.

We are Deaf. We are technological. We are tired. We are resilient. We are grieving. We are proud. We are lonely. We are learning. We are rebuilding.

We are inventing ourselves in real time.

We are not a bridge. We are not a halfway point. We are not a diluted version of anyone else’s identity.

We are a third culture.

A culture born out of gaps, contradictions, survival, silence, electricity, and grit.

A culture with no elders, no map, no blueprint so we became the architects ourselves.

And maybe one day, the world will finally understand that Deafness was never the limitation.

The limitation was the boxes they tried to fit us into.

Chapter 11: A Third Culture - The World That Didn’t Exist Until We Lived It

No one planned for us.

No one sat down and said, “Let’s create a world for Deaf children who are implanted, who straddle cultures, who will need a completely new framework of belonging.”

The tech came first. The narrative followed:

“Look at this miracle. Look how normal they are now.”

The culture never caught up.

But quietly, without approval, without permission, we began to form something:

Deaf people with implants finding each other online and saying, “Oh my god, you feel that too?”
Mixed signing/speaking spaces where no one side-eyes your accent in either language
Group chats switching between captions, voice notes, signed videos
People saying, “You’re Deaf enough,” and meaning it
A shared understanding of what it is to walk into any room and know you’re going to be misunderstood at first glance

We are not an experiment anymore. We are a community, whether anyone has named us or not.

But the world still treats us like data points. Policymakers debate us. Audiologists measure us. Advocates argue about us. Strangers analyse us. Yet very few people ask us. We’re spoken about more than we’re spoken with. Our bodies are public conversations; our identities, public battlegrounds.

We are Deaf. We are not hearing. We are not diluted. We are not broken. We are not half-anything.

We are whole people living in a world that hasn’t updated its categories.

Because society still treats Deafness as a binary.

You’re either: Deaf with a capital D with fluency, culture, community, identity —

hearing through technology, effort, “normalisation”.

But what about the rest of us?

The ones who don’t fit neatly into either? The ones who live where labels blur? The ones whose existence itself is a challenge to everyone else’s comfort?

We are the Deaf people who are never represented. Never talked about. Never fully understood.