Folks, we live in a cruel world. We live in a world where people judge and form opinions of people's goodness based upon simple notions. In a world where everyone, at some point, struggles with their health, we still fight stigma every day.
Merriam-Webster defines stigma as: "A mark of shame or discredit" and claims "stain" to be a synonym. A stigma arises when doing something good for us may bring attention to a not-so-savory health concern.
From a personal place, I have always been overweight. When I was a teenager, I was 15-20 lbs overweight, but because children are cruel, it felt like 100 lbs. When I left high school and went off to my undergraduate program, I spent years eating poorly in the dining halls with all my friends, and gained weight. Then I suffered from a serious illness at 20, and gained more weight. I'm about to turn 26, and have just now begun my gym and diet regiment legitimately for the first time. Now I have 60 lbs to lose. It's entirely due to stigma.
At no point did I feel that I was "doing things the healthy way" during these 8 years between high school and now. So why would I continue my behavior? Well, I knew that every time I went out with friends and requested no cheese, no fries or no sauce, it would bring attention to the fact that I am overweight and open me up to comments about what I should and shouldn't be eating by friends who don't see my activity levels day to day. I so didn't want to face my weight that I spent years preferring to feel unhealthy and unattractive over doing something about a very fixable health problem. 12 lbs down, 48 to go!
What in the world does this story have to do with hearing loss?
Unfortunately, hearing loss is a stigmatized health problem. It would be naive to state that there are not people out there that still associate hearing loss with being less intelligent, less socially adept, and "a burden of old people". This negative view of hearing loss does nothing good for people suffering from hearing loss. Just like my struggles with my weight, people know that every time they change the volume on a hearing aid, the hearing aid chirps, or they have to remove it because of overexposing settings, it opens them up to unwarranted comments about their hearing or hearing aid. To this day, people fight me on smaller instrument sizes or smaller power matrices because they just don't want to take their hearing by the horns. It hurt me, as a hearing aid specialist, when someone deprives themselves of auditory input to go "down a size", but then again, I have shoved myself into a pair of Spanx many times in my life to go "down a size" instead of working out.
We sadly, live in a world of quick fixes. Health requires a lifestyle to back it up. Everyone struggles with something, and if you're the person who knows they need to walk around with earplugs because you have a family history of hearing loss, or work somewhere very loud, there is nothing wrong with that. Earplugs and hearing aids exist to help people, not bring out the worst in people.
From the bottom of my heart, I pray that everyone who is avoiding getting help with their hearing because of stigma finds the strength to overcome the cruelty of a world that pushes the unhealthy aside. It feels so wonderful to have control over your health. At times it's incredibly overwhelming, because you are the only one to blame for the missteps that everyone takes on the path to health, but when you have the power to overcome something you are labeled with by our world, nothing can stop you!!!