you said you were hard of hearing right?? how do you know when things are loud/are things still loud to you?

i am! i can still hear relatively okayish, but things are more muffled than they would be to someone who has perfect hearing. i wasn’t always HOH either, it developed over time and i only started to notice a real difference a few years ago.
to answer your question, i know certain things are loud objectively–things like fireworks, loud bangs, and alarms are supposed to be loud, so even though they don’t bother me because of the volume, i know they’re loud sounds because i recognize that they can be heard over a larger area and from experiences with them in the past. i’ll still be able to hear a fire alarm for example, but it won’t be blaringly loud (the ones at my high school were so loud that i was the only one BARELY not covering my ears because i could tolerate it).
if you put one of those air horns next to my ear and press it i’ll jump back, but if you do the same thing a few feet in front of me you’ll catch my attention at most.
My headphones are constantly set to the max volume and don’t sound loud to me, and my music is always set to louder than normal in the car. i constantly have closed captions on (except at the theaters bc its too much of a hassle to get a captioning device just to watch a movie). My headphones are also set to have more sound/louder sound come out of the left ear to balance because its worse than my right (which is why youll constantly see me with my headphone in my left ear to make sure i can still hear whats goings on around me).