I have something called Central Auditory Processing Disorder. Basically, my ears are just fine, but my brain has some disturbances in how it processes auditory information. I have periodic episodes where I can hear people speaking, but what they're saying literally sounds like gibberish to me. Even when my internal translator isn't off for a coffee break, it takes me a long time to understand verbal information.
I got lucky and was able to access language through the written word early on (a lot of kids who have it have trouble learning to read; for a long time for me, the spoken word and the written word were two completely different languages) and so the impact it's had on my life in general has been reasonably minimal, especially since they invented the Internet. I finally learned how to socialize in person once i got to practice in text for a while.
I have a lot of workarounds and coping mechanisms, and keeping my level of stress reasonably low means that it doesn't bother me much. It takes a lot of energy to listen to people speak, and my version of hell is an all-day meeting, but, you know, technology is a wonderful thing, in general. :)
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Date: 2004-08-26 05:46 pm (UTC)I got lucky and was able to access language through the written word early on (a lot of kids who have it have trouble learning to read; for a long time for me, the spoken word and the written word were two completely different languages) and so the impact it's had on my life in general has been reasonably minimal, especially since they invented the Internet. I finally learned how to socialize in person once i got to practice in text for a while.
I have a lot of workarounds and coping mechanisms, and keeping my level of stress reasonably low means that it doesn't bother me much. It takes a lot of energy to listen to people speak, and my version of hell is an all-day meeting, but, you know, technology is a wonderful thing, in general. :)