How Masking Changed My Experience of Being Deaf
“I’m sorry for participating in the deaf apocalypse.” For a hearing friend and me, this line, delivered in sign language, became a running gag early in the pandemic. She and I had moved in as temporary “corona-roomies” during the spring of 2020. When we left our apartment and pulled our masks over our mouths, she would apologize for having to make communication even harder for me. As we ventured out into the new world of obscured faces, we joked about the deaf apocalypse again and again.
Apocalypse—such a dramatic word! Yet as The New, , and many other news outlets noted at the time, face masks can create challenges for deaf and hard-of-hearing people who communicate through lipreading. I was one of those people. Seemingly overnight, my long-standing approach to visual communication became unworkable. Friends’ mouths vanished. I roamed shops and streets suddenly filled with featureless people, their speech now as indecipherable as that of Charlie Brown’s invisible schoolteacher: . Whenever I saw the masks and thought of all they had erased, I felt dismay.
