People with perfectly normal hearing are able to hear and understand much of the sound around them automatically. They don't have to get help from lipreading. They don't have to concentrate. They don't have to stop what they're doing. They just hear. (Of course, they don't hear and understand everything—nobody does.)

Someone with a hearing loss doesn't have the luxury of automatic hearing. If you have a hearing loss, you have to pay close attention, use lipreading when you can, concentrate. Hearing and understanding don't happen automatically. Hearing takes attention and energy, and you just can't do it 12 or 14 hours a day.

Hearing aids allow you to hear better, and that's great. But it may be just as important that hearing aids allow you to hear with less effort and less energy. They allow you to be more relaxed as you communicate with the people around you.

Of course, you can't listen carefully full-time, and there will be times when you don't hear as well as at other times. You may not hear as well if you're tired, under stress, or you're thinking about something else. That's why we suggest that anyone speaking to you get your attention before speaking.

On the other hand, if you're ready to hear, if you're paying attention—you can hear better when you really want to. You just can’t do it full-time.

Actually, many people with hearing loss are able to hear and communicate surprisingly well in spite of hearing only 50% or 60% of the speech sounds. But we live in a very demanding hearing world and sometimes anything less than 100% is just not good enough. If someone tells you, "OK, I'll see you on the fifteenth," and you hear, "OK, I'll see you on the sixteenth," it wasn't good enough to hear most of the message.

So the next time someone says, "You can hear me when you really want to," you can correct them: "No, you mean I can hear you when I really work at it."