Something I read once that still explains me trying to hear others when they talk.

This is a quote from a forum where people are talking about hearing aids and is one of the best descriptions of what I go through just to talk to others I've ever found. It's a doctor telling a mom what her 13 year old daughter is going to experience from congenital hearing loss.

"(Hearing) people use selective inattention and decide casually what to tune out. But your daughter has to use selective attention. She has to constantly decide when to listen and then devote energy to doing so. It's an exhausting process that requires both physical and cognitive concentration. When you see two men talking while leaning on a fence and looking at a mule, you hear the conversation and choose to ignore them or not. She has to process the scene, decide if it's important, cognitively evaluate context to decide they might be talking about the mule, then apply all that to decode the sounds she hears."

If they are talking fast I'm not going understand it. Hearing aids or no.