Скачать или смотреть The Real Experience of Living with Auditory Processing Disorder

Seventeen-year-old Lin Xiao sat in the third row of the classroom, her fingers unconsciously picking at the edge of her textbook. The math teacher’s voice came from the podium, but it was like crushed glass shards, mingling with the cicada chirps outside the window and the sound of pen tips scraping paper from the back row, crashing randomly in her ears. She stared at the teacher’s lips, trying to catch every shape, but those syllables seemed enchanted—clearly entering her ears, yet her brain took several seconds to decode them. By the time she understood the explanation of "quadratic functions," the teacher had already moved on to example calculations.
Her deskmate gently nudged her arm and handed her a note with formulas written on it. When Lin Xiao looked up, she met the teacher’s confused gaze—the teacher had just called on her to answer a question, but due to auditory processing delay, she had frozen in place, unresponsive. All eyes in the class turned to her. She clenched the note tightly, her throat constricting. It wasn’t that she wasn’t paying attention; there was just a thick layer of fog between her brain and her ears. Sounds that others could easily capture required her to wander through a maze for a long time to find the exit.

During lunch break, her deskmate walked with her on the playground. The soft rustle of wind through the leaves gradually relaxed her tense nerves. "You don’t have to force yourself to keep up with everyone else’s pace," her deskmate said, slowing down her speech and enunciating each word clearly. "I can lend you my notes, and we can go through them slowly." Lin Xiao nodded. At this moment, the wind, the rustling leaves, and her deskmate’s gentle words—without messy overlap—finally became sounds she could easily accept. It turned out that not all sounds were tiring; she just needed someone willing to wait for her to walk out of the sound maze.