Half-deaf in a Hearing World By Alana Rae (she/her)
Kieran Lotz talks about his passion for music and theatre, all in spite of a disability stacking the odds against him.
As I wandered up to Albert Park, I was unaware of who exactly I was meeting. I knew I’d have to take a stab and guess out of who was near the rotunda. Luckily for me, the description of a 20-year-old uni student fitted perfectly to the guy sitting a little way ahead of me: shoulder bag, cargo pants and foot tapping to whatever was coming through his headphones. “Excuse me, are you Kieran?” I was welcomed with a beaming smile and we straight away got chatting about the perils of assignments and the post-highschool doom of deciding our life direction. Kieran Lotz now studies fashion at Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design after a gap year pursuing makeup artistry. Moving up to Auckland from Wellington almost a year ago, his passion for music, theatre and everything creative is clear upon first impression. But other parts of Kieran’s life aren’t quite as obvious. “At birth, the doctors said I was completely fine. It wasn’t until I was four years old that they found out I was losing my hearing.
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"I can’t hear beeps, I can’t hear whistles, I can’t hear alarms. You know that game you played with whispers when you were younger? Couldn’t do that. I had to sit out, like, every single time.” “Then, every few years, I would get a test and they would be like, ‘oh… you’ve lost even more’. “With my half-deafness now, it’s not like I can’t hear anything. The way it works is everything is divided into high sounds and low sounds. For me, I can hear low sounds perfectly fine. But high sounds? No clue. “I can’t hear beeps, I can’t hear whistles, I can’t hear alarms. You know that game you played with whispers when you were younger? Couldn’t do that. I had to sit out, like, every single time.” Yet still, his hearing loss didn’t stop him from dabbling in the music scene when he hit intermediate school.
“When I was 12, I really got into playing the marimba for a few years. It’s like a giant xylophone and you would always play in a big group.” The thing is, Kieran’s deafness meant he couldn’t rely on others for timing and sometimes couldn’t even hear what his own instrument was playing. He would turn to memorising the timing just to make sure he was hitting on beat. Sadly, Kieran did leave the marimba world behind him, but currently listens to music every chance he can get. He claims he’s not super up to date with current music or follows the ‘trends’, so early 2010s pop suits his love of happy, upbeat songs that can turn his mood around.
