At seven years old, I spent nearly every school break-time copying out lines from Peter & Jane books, as I never did what I was told. My teacher didn’t like me and I didn’t like her – she’d never explain maths problems to me when I didn’t understand, and she used to shout at me when I got it wrong. This familiar pattern meant I soon developed a love of writing and hatred of maths. I also became accidentally cool with the boys in my class as I was always in trouble.

At eight, I announced I was going to become a concert violinist and began lessons in earnest. I also became a Kylie Minogue fan but could never understand why she mumbled so much. I used to think that songs didn’t have lyrics and you could just make your own up – much to amusements of the mean girls in my class when I started singing, ‘Put your hand on your heart and tell me that you’re blue, oooh ahhhhhhh!’ *sniff

At 10, my parents took me for a hearing test and were told by an audiologist that I was deaf. They shut me in a space rocket-shaped sound-proof room and played lots of sounds that I knew I should be hearing. I couldn’t hear them and felt very afraid.

Overnight I became different from the 20 other children in my class, and every single member of my family – with the exception of Very-Old-Deaf-Great-Aunt from Scotland. I became a hearing-aid wearer.

It was weird – I didn’t feel deaf – I felt like me. I didn’t know that birds were meant to sing, that green men beeped and that Kylie Minogue was actually singing words. More to the point, I actually didn’t care. I still played my violin, hell, I took up the flute and piano for good measure and continued to do everything exactly the way I would have done before they told me I was deaf. And so began the long battle to get me to ‘come to terms’ with my hearing and actually wear my hearing aids.

At 16, without explanation, I suddenly got a whole lot deafer. However, I still continued to focus on what I wanted out of life, I took up the double bass as it’s a whole lot lower than the violin, and still found no real reason to wear hearing aids. This was something that no amount of crazy hearing therapists could convince me to do, and to this day, my aids still sit in a box by my bed and only very occasionally come out for token day trips.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I’m sure hearing aids are beneficial for lots of people – but they’re just not for me. They make everything sound weird. Birds and babies crying sound like white noise. They also make everything loud – the first time I peed while wearing them, I felt sure the whole world could hear me. Worse still, loud noises make me fall over. Seriously, I’ll be walking along and along comes a police car. Oops, Deafinitely Girly is on the floor and people are staring!

At 18, in my first year at university, I was slinking across a nightclub in my flappin’ flares (oh-so-cool in the late 90s) and platform trainers (less cool but a bit of an obsession of mine) when I walked past what looked like a podium and fell over. It was in fact a speaker and the volume was such that I suddenly had the physical aptitude of a newborn foal who’d been at the gin. It was very embarrassing, not least because everyone thought I was drunk.

These bizarre episodes in my life became so frequent that they actually made being deaf funny. No boyfriend could ever whisper sweet nothings in my ear…

At 19, I found myself on a campsite, in a tent, in the dark with a boy I quite fancied. It was freezing so we were cuddling to keep warm (it was all quite chaste, I promise) when suddenly he whispered something to me.
‘Pardon?’ I said and he repeated himself.
‘It’s too dark, I can’t hear you,’ I responded.
And so this went on as I frantically scrabbled about for my head torch.
He tried once more with his question when suddenly someone piped up from the tent next door, ‘Oh for god’s sake, just kiss him!’

And don’t even get me started on the subject of kissing – that was one of my first experiences, but just recently it’s been getting me into a whole lotta trouble. Recently, on a girls’ night out, we were all hip-shaking away when this guy came up to me and started talking.

He was cute and kept shouting in my ear (not cute).
I'm deaf, I yelled at him over Kelly Rowland's latest tune...
He replied something in my ear...
Frustrated, I grabbed his face and put it opposite mine so I could lip read him... and he kissed me!
‘It wasn't a come-on you randy so-and-so,’ I wanted to scream, but I was otherwise occupied!

And so, I moved on and found myself cornered by a rather gorgeous guy, who too had a penchant for chatting up my ear...
‘I'm hard of hearing,’ I tried this time... to which he replied something to my ear.
So I grabbed his face...
and well, you know the rest...

It was events like this that inspired me to start up Deafinitely Girly – to sound out my frustrations, demand that changes be made, point out the good things about living with a hearing loss and share the downright hilarious.

To me, it’s the therapy I needed all those years ago when I was asking how I felt about my hearing loss – well here you go guys, this is it!

Read all about DG’s adventures in the city, in her blog.