Autistic and Hard of Hearing: Navigating a World of Mixed Signals

Finding Identity and Community in Neurodivergent Spaces

My first time hanging out with a group of neurodivergent people was as a teenager at the Freedom Centre (FC), a rainbow youth space in my city run by WAAC. This place was amazing to teenage me. It was my third space – my home away from home – and it helped me consolidate my identity and build confidence in myself. 

During on drop-in session, early on in my time at FC, I realised that three other people sitting near me were also autistic. This was very exciting to me – I had only recently been talked through autism by a psychiatrist, so was finding my feet within this new framework of understanding myself. The four of us started chatting madly, all over the top of each other (of course!) about school, family, life, and so on.

Somewhere in this, one of the other autistic people started talking about the annoyance of whining electronics, especially when they could hear them and no one else could. The other two people in our circle responded with enthusiastic agreement, jumping over each other to share their own experiences of this phenomenon. 

I, on the other hand, had no idea what they were talking about. ‘High pitched whining’ of electronics was not something I had any particular understanding of. However, I’d only just found an ‘in-group’ for myself, so I copied the others and emphatically agreed that this alien phenomenon was a) a very common experience and b) very annoying at that. 

It was only many years later, when I was handed my first pair of adult hearing aids, that this discrepancy clicked into place for me. No wonder I had no idea what they were talking about – my largest portion of Hard of Hearing Gain (HoH) is in the high pitch section of my audiology report! 

All of this has led me to ponder the intersection of HoH/Deaf experiences and autistic experiences. Below are the results of said pondering.

Sensory Overlap: Music, Focus, and Autism Sensory Support

For me, the sensory overlap between autistic experience and being HoH shows up in unexpected places. My first and most long-abiding special interest is music. Because I’m missing chunks of auditory information, especially in the higher ranges, I miss elements of songs that the artist fully intended me to hear. This means I’m often operating with a slightly different context to other listeners, because I’m simply not receiving the same cues. At the same time, this absence has sharpened my focus in other interesting directions – I can hone in on the layers of a song I do have access to, which can make for a really unique way of engaging with sound, rhythm, and Deaf-specific forms of musical expression, such as the wonderful Boorloo-based Deaf band, Alter Boy (I’ve seen them live many times and they’re awesome!!).

There’s also the flip side: less overwhelm. Having hearing aids has genuinely reduced my sensory load at times, because the ‘focus in noise’ setting on my Hearing Australia devices allows me to control and filter background noise rather than being assaulted by unpredictable sound. Additionally, with less sound-based information, I often shift attention to visual or proprioceptive elements instead, which creates a different and unique sensory experience overall!

Autism Communication Differences and the Social Decoding Drain

Socially, the overlap between autistic communication differences and HoH experiences is enormous. Missing parts of what people are saying shapes how I participate in every conversation – and I miss thing both due to being Hard of Hearing and due to the Auditory Processing Disorder that’s so commonly cooccurring in an autistic profile! I’ve ended up honing lip-reading skills in order to manage both concurrently. I’ve also ended up becoming more reliant on facial expression and tone as scaffolding, which has made me surprisingly adept at reading facial expressions (at least for an autist) while still leaving me utterly exhausted from all the extra decoding 😅. 

However, this extra effort can also mean that I come across as more rehearsed or robotic, because my brain is juggling comprehension, response timing, masking, anxiety about missing information, and the pressure to slot in social filler phrases at the right moment, all at once! And when I’m speaking my second language – Spanish – everything changes again, because the distribution of sounds I can and can’t hear changes across languages. All of this can contribute to a deeper sense of loneliness, or alternatively, a greater comfort in solitude because it demands less cognitive strain. And of course, the classic risk remains: I might miss the one crucial piece of context that prevents a social faux pas, and then spend the next week analysing it like CCTV footage! 

Compounding Complexity: Executive Function Autism and Multitasking

Executive function is another area where the autistic and HoH worlds intertwine in complicated ways. Reading and writing can already be demanding for autistic people, and HoH folks often encounter similar challenges, which means these tasks continue to require more energy well into adulthood. Multitasking is also something that compounds in trickiness – if I look away from someone while trying to complete another task, I’m likely to lose the auditory thread entirely, so I end up having to physically anchor my attention on lip reading in order to parse a complete message.

Over time, I have gotten better at filling in context gaps, simply because I’ve had to do it constantly. I reckon I may also lean more towards visual thinking than auditory, rely more heavily on working memory, and deal with even more end-of-day fatigue than an autistic baseline already brings. Attending any kind of event requires additional, additional planning – I need to think about acoustics, sound levels, seating, lighting, accessibility of communication, and whether I’ve remembered to charge (or even bring) my hearing aids. Then there’s the classic HoH problem: everything in my life now has a charger. My hearing aids, my backup battery, my phone that controls my hearing aids, the emergency powerbank for when the first two fail. More problems, yes – but also more opportunities to practise creative problem-solving.

Intersectionality and Collective Strength in the Neurodivergent Community

I’ve come to feel that there is a deep synergy between Deaf culture and autistic culture. Both communities were early adopters of identity-first language, both have strong cultural and political identities, and both embrace non-normative uses of language. Some autistic people use key word sign – some Deaf people use high-tech AAC or text-to-speech devices. There are overlaps and divergences in facial expression norms, communication preferences, and social expectations, but both groups share a commitment to creating spaces where our ways of being are celebrated.

Navigating both identities myself is fascinating. I feel immediately at home in autistic spaces because my support needs sit at a mid-level, and autistic culture aligns very naturally with how my brain works. Deaf community is a bit different for me – my hearing loss is mild, so I don’t feel that same autobiographical overlap in the stories Deaf people often tell about their journeys. Still, one of my long-term goals is to keep improving my Auslan and to participate more actively in Deaf spaces, because the cultural depth and collective solidarity of Deaf communities are things I deeply admire.

Check out in-person Auslan classes if you can, or online options if that’s more accessible. When disabled people come together in shared spaces, we build capacity, resilience, political strength, and entirely new ways of navigating the world. Community is powerful.

Go join something. Do the thing! Yayy!!