It's hard to imagine when your hearing is normal, how difficult not hearing can be and in what ways. I want to give you the smallest and maybe most obvious of example. 

<center> https://i0.wp.com/media2.slashfilm.com/slashfilm/wp/wp-content/images/lostintranslation-spokeart-variant-frontpage-700x321.jpg </center>
<center> Not understanding a language is the same as not hearing it </center>

I wrote about it in a few posts but today I remembered the totally gut-wrenching feeling of being confused and not allowed to show it. In any conversation where, at one point, due to not hearing enough to make sense of what is said, you basically lost track of what happens you have two options: fake understanding, ask for understanding. 

What's realy so frustrating is that asking is SO damn difficult. So difficult for most of us that faking is the go to for a lot of hearing impaired people. And faking is so perverse. It's perverse that you can get out of a convo having learned nothing about the subject, the person or the situation and feeling lousy for it BUT the other person will often kind-of felt your lack of engagement and leave with a feeling that you did not really care about what was said and/or are a condescending asshole. We both lose but in different ways. A failure of communication in the most literal of senses.

The solution seems so easy: ask for louder sounds, ask for clarification. Yes, once is ok, constantly it becomes a problem of imposing yourself, too much, way too much to be acceptable. So, you say nothing, you learn nothing, you have nothing to say. **Not hearing does not make the world silent, it renders you silent.**

A few years back I was out with a girl-friend and she was talking about something and asked me some questions and at one point I realized, to my surprise too, that I had no clue what she said in the last 5 minutes. She sense that, looked at me and asked:

"Why are you lost?"

What can one say.