“Because it’s really hard being a spouse to somebody who cannot hear anything – but believes they can,” he said with prototypical Neuman panache. Reidel urged Neuman to get tested, and in 2009, a doctor classified him as severely hard of hearing.
“They really couldn’t believe how bad my hearing had become, or how much I had just been compensating,” said Neuman, who realized he was not so much hearing conversations anymore but rather piecing them together by watching people’s faces.
That’s also when he started to explore playwriting. Not as a conscious response to his disability – ”but I do feel like there’s a connection there,” he said. Deciphering what someone might have just told Neuman in a crowded room is not unlike him constructing a narrative on his laptop, he said.
Read the full article here