I feel like an outsider when in a work situation sometimes, where I think, 'I wish I knew what
the depth of the discussion there they're asking me to contribute.
I feel like an outsider when I'm trying to balance my working life with the demands of
my disability, in terms of I've got concentrate, I've got to lipread, I've got to listen all
day long. I feel like an outsider when such a simple thing as ordering a coffee becomes
a bit complicated because someone doesn't know how to cope. I feel like an outsider
sometimes in my family. I'm the only deaf person in my family. But I don't feel like
an outsider when I meet people who've been through struggle.
My name is Julia Margaret Gilchrist, I'm thirty three years old, and I was born profoundly
deaf in both ears. Look Julia, I've written some blends on the
box, do you think you could... It was the end of the world, it really was.
There's a grieving process associated with establishing that the child you thought you
had is not the child that in fact you have. Then we started to check back and we saw photographs,
for instance, where she would be straining to look at someone's lips. She grew up in
a world where she assumed everyone didn't hear anything and the way we communicated
was reading lips. When I was going through school, it was very
trial and error. If I made a mistake the social consequences were incredible. Lipreading people's
insults or discussions about me from across the playground, knowing that people were saying
something about me; it's profoundly alienating because I'm such a people person and I love
being around people. For me, I have this amazing close family and people who care about me,
and then just making my own way indepenendently was just god-awful. And that was a trigger
for why I got my first cochlear implant just before I turned 21. They turned it on and
I went, 'Jesus, f***, that's noisy!' And the audiologist and mum were crying 'yes!' and
I'm like 'what the f*** is this?' And so I'm like 'turn it off'. If you go through a periods
of isolation and bullying it's easier to turn the hearing aid off if you want to rest from
the conversation and the noise to regroup and then think 'how am I going to tackle this
situation?'. I'm kind of slack, I just pull it off, go like this, it's off, and I'm off
air. I'm immediately going back to looking at my visual surroundings and using that skillset
that I have. The main thing that it did was it allowed me to blend in to be able to put
my ipod on and go out in my gym and go for a bit of a run and then do situps and pushups
and whatever, like everyone else in the gym, I'm doing my speech therapy training at the
same time, and listening at the same time. It's taken me, what people achieve in three
or four years when they are babies to four years old, it has taken me 33 years to get
to that point. I know it means that I'm behind my year group and I'm behind in what people
expect with my CV, I'm behind in what people expect of my professional development, but
people don't exactly make it easy either. I am a deaf person. It's called a disability
because you are at a distinct disadvantage, socially, and it's up to the rest of the community
to go, well, how far are we going to go to help that person? Deafness is the hidden disability
you can't see that someone is deaf, so that's why people don't really accommodate it. Since
I finished high school, the number of jobs that I've held would be probably 25 to 30
jobs. It's like going to a new school every six months. And it's profoundly alienating,
because you want to get settled but you can't. It's not what I envisaged when I left high
school, because my understanding of anti-discrimination and equal opportunity was that that was running
in parallel with businesses developing the back end processes to make it possible for
me to integrate. I don't know why we got forgotten. My hearing and my listening and my speech
- that was done and dusted when I was four. But the social impact has just gone on and
on and on because we haven't quite gotten our act together on it, and I don't see any
reason why we can't. When I was nine I learned that being deaf was always only ever going
to be a part of my life. It doesn't dominate. It has a massive influence, and it shaped
how I react to events, and my resilience, and mental toughness, but you can't just sit
on that and only restrict your life experience and your understanding of what it is to be
human on that. You need to look at all the other aspects of who you are as a person,
because that's what makes dealing with the hard parts of being deaf bearable. Because
you realise there's so much more of you than just that. That's always been my approach.
That's why I'm tough as I am.