Help, Sweet Self-Help

This is an example of that natural law of the Web that says if you spend 200 unpaid hours putting information online, no matter how clearly you delimit and define your topic, someone will come along and expect you to solve their problems. They will tell you that you are unhelpful and accuse you of false advertising if you point out that their problem is outside of the scope of your volunteer ambitions. Post something on the Web, it seems, and you acquire the obligation to provide any and all information that the most deluded of individuals can misunderstand to be remotely related to that topic. (Not to say I'm calling my unhappy visitor deluded, you understand. Many volunteer webmasters have received far more unreasonable demands than this fellow’s question.)

The battery-man berated me for misleadingly advertising help for “deafness/hearing impaired”. He said that he thought by asking for cheap-battery information for himself that he was practicing self help. (He certainly didn’t seem very helped, though, last I heard from him. And certainly, judging me by how well he was able to help himself seemed a little unfair.)

In fact, as you know from reading the site philosophy statement, giving and receiving technical advice does not become self-help just because the advice is exchanged between peers without benefit of professional expertise. You will also know from reading elsewhere on the Page that I don’t profess to deal with mild or moderate hearing loss and all that hearing aid stuff, and I don’t even favour the term “hearing impaired”. I am not the font of “hearing impairment” wisdom. This site is about being deafened, period. In his sequence from initial inquiry to final tirade, he sent me three notes and never once mentioned whether he was deaf or just mildly hard of hearing.

If battery-man had written and said, “I don't know what is happening to me. I am making embarrassing mistakes and giving bizarre answers to people. I feel like I am hearing them but I am misunderstanding all the time. Is this deafness?” I would not have said “you should get a hearing aid.” I likely would have responded, “I can relate to your feelings of embarrassment and making mistakes. That was exactly how I felt at an earlier stage in my progressive deafness.” I may even have said that many people find that professional advice from an audiologist helps, if there is enough residual hearing to make a hearing aid functional. I might have given some examples of instances where it happened to me, and even how I wriggled out of the embarrassment.

If battery-man had written and said, “I am starting to feel the need to use my hearing aid but it’s been in a drawer for five years. I can’t face the audiologist to go buy batteries, because I am sure she will know,” I likely would have responded, “Been there, done that. I’ve even -ahem- made some adjustments to my aid to avoid going to an audiologist, to avoid getting lectured on non-use. I’m glad I could at least get batteries in the neighbourhood drugstore. I wonder if your drugstore might carry them.”

But battery-man wasn’t dealing with a “feelings” issue about getting batteries. He didn’t even ask me where to get batteries. He knew where to get batteries and he was asking me where to get them cheap. That is not self-help in dealing with deafness. Perhaps it is self-help in dealing with a tight budget, but this site is not about frugality. It is about deafness. If you want to know where to get devices cheap as a result of your limited earning potential, sorry in advance—I don’t know. I’m on your wavelength if you want to talk about how you’re coping—or not coping—with the economic consequences of deafness, or about feeling choked out of your professional potential.

I’m not here to give you facts or manipulate your consciousness; at any given time, any facts I consider appropriate for me to share are already on the Page. On this site, I say several times—and in all sincerity—that I enjoy receiving notes from deafened people. I often respond to these notes and I have enjoyed the correspondence, comparing experiences in coping with deafness. The characteristic of that correspondence is that it’s about experiences and feelings, not facts. I am not advertising that I will offer advice or find products or services for you. If something I write helps you, great, I’ve helped you. But it will help because something in you makes a connection—self help—not because of something I’ve done. For someone as opinionated as me, it would be a lot easier to tell you what to do than to have the self-discipline to refrain from it, but refrain I must, because I believe in self-help: the ability of a healthy adult to heal and grow within a supportive environment.