Hearing people, please grasp this. Maybe to you, “Never mind” or “It wasn’t important, forget it” is an ordinary thing that hearing people actually say to each other on occasion without it being a big deal. For hearing people. (I mean, when said in response to someone saying, “I missed what you said, please say that again.”) Personally I have a hard time conceiving of how this behavior can be seen as okay by anyone, but this is what I’ve been told, so fine, I’ll buy it.
But what you need to understand is this: deaf people always have to deal with hearing people, all the time, every single day, who just don’t want to have to deal with us and our communication access needs. We encounter hearing people who act hostile when we ask them to please repeat themselves or write things down. We encounter hearing people who seem pathologically incapable of grasping the concept that sometimes lip reading just isn’t going to work and yes they really will need to write it down before I have any hope of understanding it. We encounter hearing people who avoid us like the plague at social events because they don’t want the nuisance of having to repeat themselves all the time or write things down. This means that 99 percent of the time when we are told, “Never mind”, what it really means is, “Eff you, I don’t want to have to deal with you.”
So when you say, “Never mind,” or “I’ll tell you later” (Will you really remember? Most hearing people don’t.) or, “Forget it”? We have absolutely no way to tell apart a hearing person who says this because they can’t be bothered with us and a hearing person who has other motivations.
If you want us to recognize that you’re really, truly not intending to give us the brush off, then the solution is simple. Don’t give us the brush off. Just repeat what you said, or just write it down. Because anything else is giving us the brush off whether that’s what you intended or not. Even if it would never be seen as a “brush off” by other hearing people. Saying “never mind” doesn’t have the same meaning to deaf people as it does to hearing people and no amount of trying to explain the perspective of hearing people is going to erase the long and painful history that every deaf and hard of hearing person (and probably also, people with auditory processing disorder) has with that awful phrase, “Never mind.”
Also? It can be scary to have to ask hearing people to repeat themselves, precisely because we so often encounter negative reactions. Even when I’m not scared, per se, it is still exhausting every time I ask because I still have to fight really hard to suppress the natural and instinctive tendency to “social bluff” my way through the interaction. When hearing people keep saying, “Never mind”, even if you think you didn’t mean anything by it, it just makes it harder to ask people to repeat the next time I need to do it. So, just please don’t.