How I Go On Nights Out As A Deaf Music Fan

I'm a deaf music fan, and yes, we exist. The one thing I love about being deaf is being able to go to somewhere that's really noisy like a club and being able to use my sign language skills to to communicate.

With-that-said, it can be very difficult to communicate with someone who is a staff member in a venue. It's always kind of dark and some accents are so strong that you can't pick it up. That's why for me personally, it's good to have an interpreter in place, because that way if they hear it - I can hear it.

There are many different levels of deafness, but today, we are still being seen as one big equal group. I have cochlear implant that converts sound into electrical signals that my brain can interpret, however as soon as I take it off, I'm profoundly deaf.

I don't think deaf people need to be fixed. A lot of deaf people go their whole lives not wearing hearing aids or cochlear implants because they want to be able to communicate through sign language. They want to choose their own identity, in that sense.

I'm never going to stop seeing live music, I love the feeling of escapism it gives me. Everyone's there, and everyone kind of shares that experience as a whole.