Left Behind in the Noise: Deaf Anxiety on Public Transport

The bus was full.
People were talking, the engine was humming, announcements were being made somewhere in the noise. I sat near the middle, checking the route on my phone, trying to match every landmark outside the window with the dots on the screen.

I can’t rely on announcements.
I’ve learned that the hard way.

Suddenly, I noticed people shifting.
Someone stood up. Then two more. Then the crowd began to move like a wave, bags slung over shoulders, footsteps toward the door, jackets zipped up.

I looked around.
Was this my stop? The final stop?
Was something wrong?

I didn’t hear anything. No announcement. No signal.

My heart started racing not in panic, but in trained alertness. This wasn’t new. This wasn’t shocking.

It was just... familiar.

A familiar fear that maybe I had missed something.
That everyone else knew something I didn’t.
That, once again, I would be the only one sitting there, confused, stuck, left behind.

I thought about asking the person next to me. But then came the hesitation:

“What if they don’t understand me?” 

“What if they get annoyed?” 

“What if I ask something obvious and they look at me like I’m stupid?”

I didn’t want to explain again why I hadn’t heard. Why I need to ask twice.
Why I seem ‘fine’ but still miss things.

So I did what many of us do.
I stood up.
I followed the crowd.
I got off the bus, unsure if it was the right stop, but more afraid of being wrong in front of others.

Outside, I smiled. Kept walking. Pretended I was confident in where I was going.
But inside, I was tired.

Not tired from walking.
Tired from performing.

 

This isn’t just a story about a bus ride.

This is what Deaf anxiety looks like.
This is hypervigilance — a psychological state where you're constantly alert because the world forgets to include you.

It’s always watching people’s movements.
It’s memorizing patterns to keep up.
It’s overthinking whether or not to ask a question.
It’s second-guessing yourself because you don’t want to be “too much trouble.”

It’s a quiet panic wrapped in a polite smile.

People often think anxiety is loud, shaking hands, heavy breathing, dramatic meltdowns.
But in our world, Deaf anxiety is silent survival.

You won’t always see it.
But it’s there in every small hesitation, every missed cue, every moment of pretending to understand when we didn’t.

We’ve missed fire alarms, doctor calls, name announcements, boarding gates, jokes, warnings not because we’re not paying attention,
but because the world was never built to speak our language.

And over time, that creates more than just inconvenience.
It creates fear.
It creates trauma.
It creates hyper-awareness, even in the most normal situations like catching a bus.

I’m not asking for sympathy.

I’m asking for understanding.

So the next time you see someone hesitate, someone stay behind, someone who seems like they’re not paying attention, pause.

We’re not slow.
We’re not lost.

We’re navigating a world that never learned to wait.
We move through it every day with our heads held high, devices in place, eyes sharp, and hearts worn thin
but we still show up.

And that’s not weakness.
That’s warrior-level strength.