By Alex Mussomeli
I am 16 years old and was born with a bilateral profound hearing loss. I was fitted with hearing aids as an infant and received a cochlear implant in my right ear when I was 3.
Despite the challenges that my hearing loss has posed, I am enjoying an enriched life.
I enjoy sharing how I am coping with hearing loss. Making myself heard gives my challenges more meaning. After all, what’s the point of experiencing something or knowing a story if you cannot share it with others? I want to show and put my journey on display and illustrate the ways how I was able to overcome my hearing loss and how I was able to grow as a person because of it.
I have done my best that I can to become completely independent and to be able to handle this life-altering disability. In fact, a few of my greatest interests in life have emerged from how I hear.
A love of foreign languages has long been a constant for Alex, despite his discouragement from school authorities.
One is my love of language. I love the way most foreign languages sound and am driven by my fascination with how the brain processes language. Because my hearing loss was treated early, I can speak my native language, English, flawlessly and intend to learn multiple languages. I have spent the past year learning Italian in school and teaching myself Japanese during my free time. Every day, I do my best to comprehend Japanese, this beautiful and challenging language, using the internet as my teacher.
It is true that getting better at listening in a foreign language is difficult for me and it’s hard to understand what people are saying, but “necessity is the mother of invention” and I’ve been able to combine several available language tools with the internet, using my love of technology, to help myself learn.
I have a great interest in technology and computing systems in particular because of the way my hearing aid and cochlear implant operated as computers. It fascinated me as someone who has always been interested in foreign languages since I was a child due to the fact that computers essentially have their own language akin to how there are many languages in the world. Since then, I have started to take my interest in technology to a different level and have begun to tinker with technological systems and am learning how to code.
The technology that helps overcome hearing loss has come a long way over the past decade. I remember that ever since I was in elementary school, getting the computer audio to work with my hearing aid and my cochlear implant via bluetooth was a pain and just not worth the trouble. However, now I have the ability to stream music through my hearing devices on my smartphone; my hearing devices almost function like headphones. This has allowed me to discover my own unique interests that I certainly couldn’t have discovered otherwise.
I am proud to share my interests as they relate to my hearing loss. I was able to overcome my disability and was able to grow as a person because of it.
Alex Mussomeli is a high school student who lives in Connecticut. His hearing loss journey appeared in “Hearing Makes Me Happy,” in the Summer 2015 issue of Hearing Health Foundation (HHF)’s Hearing Health magazine. His fundraising efforts for HHF were highlighted in Hearing Health magazine’s Spring 2016 article “Painting for a Cure.”
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I do feel like something is lost when older adults are put into what feels like isolation chambers due to our hearing ability. We have something unique to contribute from the perspective of our years, and I would like us to find a way as a society to allow us to do that.