If you’re alive and in the world, set some time aside to watch Jenn’s story. It’s told in three parts, all of which are filled with wisdom, experience, pain, and inspiration. Below you will find a fill transcription of this episode:

Jenn:

My name is Jenn Schmidt and I’m from Eden Prairie MN.

I am wanting to share my stories today to help people learn to not take things for granted, not take their life for granted and the people in it.

When I was 3, we discovered a hearing loss, but it was enough that I needed hearing aids to be able to hear. I was finally able to interact and play with my friends in the neighborhood.

Well, when I don’t have my hearing aids in I can’t hear anything at all. My hearing loss is progressive so it’s gotten worse now, it’s actually at severe. When I first got my hearing loss it was moderate. There’s a very, very strong chance that I’m going to be completely deaf within the next twenty years.

A lot of people think that it’s like putting on a pair of glasses and then you get 20/20 vision but it’s not like that at all. You put your hearing aids in but you still have to put a lot of work into weeding out the background sound. If there’s a crowd around you, you’re hearing everybody else’s voices as well as the person trying to talk to you and you need to figure out which voice is the one that you need to tune into.

I hear things totally not what they were saying…at all. [laughs] My friends call them “Jenn-isms”

Something happened with all of my friends…5^th and 6^th grade were pretty awful. They seemed to decide that I had a disease or something that they could catch. I really didn’t have friends.

There was one time when the big important thing back then was this windbreaker jacket type thing that had the Eden Prairie eagle logo on it, and it had your name on it, and it had a hood, and you could put your hands in the little muff thing. And I was so excited that I got one for Christmas and I’m like thinking, “Yay! People are going to actually like me again cause I actually have something that fits in!”

But I wore it to school and a girl wore hers to school, saw that I was wearing mine, ripped hers off and threw it in the trashcan.

I started missing a lot of school during that time because it was so not fun. I got really sick because I was so anxious and so nervous that I was starting to have really intense panic and anxiety attacks, which is hard because my personality—who I really am—is someone who craves the spotlight. But I missed so much school that I had to repeat a grade.

So my parents pulled me out and put me to Bloomington Lutheran School.

Best decision ever.

The people there were so accepting and one thing that they did differently than from any other school before that is they let me educate my classmates about my hearing loss. Like another school, they sent me out of the room and then tried to explain to my classmates about my hearing loss when I wasn’t even there.

So I had to go back to the public school for high school, but at that point I had really developed some really, really tough walls. Basically nobody was ever going to hurt me again, just not going to happen.

When I graduated, we graduated with, um, I wanna say it was 950 or 980. It really allowed me to completely disappear, which I think I needed to help myself heal.

When you are encountering someone with a hearing loss, keep in mind that it’s a struggle for them. The more open and the more interested you are, the better it’s going to be for everybody involved. Let them explain to you what their hearing loss is; let them explain to you what they need.

And teachers in particular, talk to your student and see how they want it to be handled. Don’t assume that you know best.