The International Journal of Medical Students is a relatively new journal, only in its second issue, but I'm thrilled to contribute and share insights with medical students, doctors, and medical administrators worldwide. I've always been blessed with good health, but just like anyone else I appreciate the value of clear and direct communication whenever I do visit the doctor's office. Whether one has a hearing loss or not, many of these principles of understanding and interpersonal connection hold true!
Monday, May 27, 2013
"How Can I Help You?": Perspectives from a Patient with a Hearing Loss
Reaching the end of my time at Stanford and scrambling to get things done, so this blog is long overdue for a post about my three-year CI remapping a few weeks ago (!!), plus a CI-related study I participated in at the medical school here, but alas. I'll get to those soon. For now, I'm excited to post another piece of my writing that just came out in the International Journal of Medical Students. Read on for some of my thoughts on lipreading in the medical setting, as well as the importance of doctor-patient communication:
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
O Alaska!
Things are starting to accelerate. I
went to see my auditory therapist this morning and, after working on a few
fine-tuned open-set short-phrase exercises that targeted specific sounds that
have been more difficult for me to recognize, we moved to what has honestly
become my favorite listening exercise: open-set paragraph information. If you'd
told me not too long ago that I'd be able to listen to streams of speech,
understand them, glean new information, and actually savor the stimulating
challenge of such moments, I would have told you, Are you crazy? The
crowning moment this morning: my auditory therapist read me a few short
informational paragraphs about a random subject. In this case, the subject was
Alaska, but that's all I knew about what she would say to me. She stepped behind
me, where I couldn't see her at all, and began to speak.
I now know that the U.S. purchased
the Alaskan territory from Russia in 1867 for 7.2 million dollars. I know that
Alaska is twice the size of Texas. I know that Alaska is home to a multitude of
natural resources, particularly ore mines, and that it was a destination for
the gold rush after California in the late nineteenth century (although many
people who went there went broke, even if some found gold). I know about the
colorful flowers that appear in Alaska in the summer. And so on... I couldn't
have told you any of those things before this morning. They were not familiar
tidbits for me to recognize.
I learned all of these things by
listening alone, without any context or any other information.
AND I got them all on the very first
try.
Sitting there and listening to these foreign pieces of
knowledge enter my mind, and somehow penetrate and linger there, gave me a
feeling of total wonder. This is what language does. This is what language
is. Being able to listen to it, learn from it, and use it, all in real
time: wow is all I can say.
Monday, April 8, 2013
Hitting the Radio Waves
I still find this deliciously ironic: earlier this winter, I made a radio appearance. And talking about my experience listening with a cochlear implant, no less. The show aired several weeks ago via Stanford's KZSU station, but it's now available online:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/storytelling/cgi-bin/joomla/index.php/shows/season-4/355-episode-410-listening.html
Aside from my main segment, scroll down to the bottom to catch the "bonus" piece - something I helped make with a good friend, and former roommate, of mine when she made an audio essay for a class last year. It's my favorite of those two if I do say so myself, particularly because of how special it was to work on the piece with her.
Listening to the show air was a remarkable experience (aside from the fact that I was on the radio to begin with!). A friend of mine works as a producer for the Stanford Storytelling Project, which airs these "State of the Human" radio shows each week, and on the night this particular show went live she invited me to the campus DJ station to sit amidst all the machinery and big speakers and listen to it on the air. Of course, she also graciously offered me a transcript, both for my piece and everyone else's. Following along wasn't hard at all with those printed words to read from, and I found myself getting into the music, sound effects, and vocal inflections. A very different style of storytelling than I'm used to, but still very engaging. I got to put on headphones, which I've never worn for longer than a few seconds because they used to feel uncomfortable and used to make my hearing aids squeal. I was surprised to find that they worked very well, sometimes too well, with my CI's T-mic microphone. The sound was direct, crisp, and booming, something I could get used to. (Worked less well on the hearing aid side, because the aid kept squealing per usual. So nothing has changed.)
Overall, the night not only introduced me to something new and challenged my sense of the possible - it was fun! And I've always perceived radio as this very foreign, very alien thing... Never mind that I turn on radio music all the time in the car now. I even have my favorite stations to listen to. :)
http://www.stanford.edu/group/storytelling/cgi-bin/joomla/index.php/shows/season-4/355-episode-410-listening.html
Aside from my main segment, scroll down to the bottom to catch the "bonus" piece - something I helped make with a good friend, and former roommate, of mine when she made an audio essay for a class last year. It's my favorite of those two if I do say so myself, particularly because of how special it was to work on the piece with her.
Listening to the show air was a remarkable experience (aside from the fact that I was on the radio to begin with!). A friend of mine works as a producer for the Stanford Storytelling Project, which airs these "State of the Human" radio shows each week, and on the night this particular show went live she invited me to the campus DJ station to sit amidst all the machinery and big speakers and listen to it on the air. Of course, she also graciously offered me a transcript, both for my piece and everyone else's. Following along wasn't hard at all with those printed words to read from, and I found myself getting into the music, sound effects, and vocal inflections. A very different style of storytelling than I'm used to, but still very engaging. I got to put on headphones, which I've never worn for longer than a few seconds because they used to feel uncomfortable and used to make my hearing aids squeal. I was surprised to find that they worked very well, sometimes too well, with my CI's T-mic microphone. The sound was direct, crisp, and booming, something I could get used to. (Worked less well on the hearing aid side, because the aid kept squealing per usual. So nothing has changed.)
Overall, the night not only introduced me to something new and challenged my sense of the possible - it was fun! And I've always perceived radio as this very foreign, very alien thing... Never mind that I turn on radio music all the time in the car now. I even have my favorite stations to listen to. :)
Thursday, April 4, 2013
100th Post!
When I started writing this blog almost three years ago, in late May 2010, I could never have imagined the experiences and milestones I've since achieved. And, in celebration of that sentiment, and also in celebration of 100 posts, here's a story from this past weekend that epitomizes what those three years with the CI has been able to do (and that also epitomizes the budding sense of potential I feel perhaps more strongly now than I ever have before):
I went home for Easter during the latter half of spring break and, being a low-key person by nature, was fortunate enough to get to spend much of that time chatting with my parents and some good friends. I'd gone home feeling excited about some of the progress I've made recently in auditory therapy, and warned my mother in advance that I'd "make her be mean to me" while at home by talking to me while not letting me look at her. A few times over the weekend, we did it. Sitting side by side in the quiet living room at home, I'd stare at the ceiling or across the room while we entered into a conversation. Each time she fell silent for a few moments then began speaking again, I instinctively turned my glance in the direction of her voice, as always wanting to see, to lipread. Then, as always, I forced myself away from her face and clung to the wavering thread of that voice.
It was more robust than ever, at least because I felt more able to grasp it than ever. During one conversation in particular, I found myself thinking of the days, during the summer of 2010, when we'd sit down and do endless renditions of "I like watermelon" or "I like apples," semi-closed-set exercises that despite their predictability sent me into spirals of frustration. Words sounded unfamiliar, elusive, and my brain ground its wheels and sent sparks flying just to understand the simplest things. One syllable, two syllables, foreign shapeless noises blaring at me, raising tides of pent-up energy as I reached for them but knew not how to hold them in my hand. This time, in the quiet with that oh-so-familiar voice, we actually achieved some semblance of conversational flow.
My mother would make an observational remark, and I'd get it quickly enough to say, "Oh really? How did that go?"
I asked her to repeat words here and there, but always within the context of what I'd heard: "The dog is doing what?" or "She said she'd see you when?" Listening wasn't perfect, but nor was it completely incoherent: in the dense jungle of sound, my mind always had a few strong vines to grasp, and my brain was always able to trace a terrain map of what it had heard.
Toward the end of the conversation, I realized that this kind of fill-in-the-gap is something I do all the time while lipreading. Even in this quiet conversation with a familiar voice, I was able to approach the comprehension threshold that I already achieve with sight. That sound, that listening would ever carry me there! Stunning.
In the past, we've stuck mainly with familiar subject matter even in our open-set conversations, and even that has felt stilted and difficult. This time, we were able to expound upon subjects that I knew very little about. She told me about people she'd recently met, stories they'd told her - completely open-set, unknown material to my ears. Finally, here I understood: acquiring new information through hearing, through language. Is this how it feels?
There was no more - or very little - stumbling back-and-forth through short, disconnected statements uttered only for the purpose of exercise. No more listen and repeat. "Today is Saturday." "Tomorrow is Easter." "I am tired." "You are on vacation today." None of that. I listened to fuller, more complex and coherent sentences and - I can't describe how wonderful this felt - kept up with 80-90% of what my mother was saying. It was like being liberated from elementary beginning-to-read books into the world of prose and literature. That's the only way I can think of to describe it.
Finally, the most exulting, the most elusive feeling of all: the feeling of being able to move beyond meaning to engaging with actual content. The words came more easily to me when I heard them, and I lingered less on their meaning, spent less time slamming my head against the shadowy surface of each word before its sound waves vanished forever. I heard; I understood; I formulated a response. My brain felt increasingly able to process meaning in real time. Returning to the jungle analogy, it was like swinging through the forest canopy on vines, reaching the end of each arc and actually finding another handhold there instead of swinging backward to where I started - or, worse yet, missing and falling to the underbrush below.
Conversational flow: understanding what someone else is saying, easily and effortlessly enough to respond and feel comfortable with the give and take of words. It may not have been perfect this past weekend, but it was far better than I have ever experienced. That sensation of electric auditory back-and-forth felt like a gift. A gift of that mysterious black box inside my skull, calculating sound frequencies and piecing them together and presenting them back to me in a wrapped package. I still don't entirely understand how it happens, still can't entirely believe that it could happen to someone like me.
Three years ago, I would have found this kind of experience incomprehensible. Here's to my nearly three-year-old baby ear (and more posts, like a proud parent, to chronicle its progress)!
I went home for Easter during the latter half of spring break and, being a low-key person by nature, was fortunate enough to get to spend much of that time chatting with my parents and some good friends. I'd gone home feeling excited about some of the progress I've made recently in auditory therapy, and warned my mother in advance that I'd "make her be mean to me" while at home by talking to me while not letting me look at her. A few times over the weekend, we did it. Sitting side by side in the quiet living room at home, I'd stare at the ceiling or across the room while we entered into a conversation. Each time she fell silent for a few moments then began speaking again, I instinctively turned my glance in the direction of her voice, as always wanting to see, to lipread. Then, as always, I forced myself away from her face and clung to the wavering thread of that voice.
It was more robust than ever, at least because I felt more able to grasp it than ever. During one conversation in particular, I found myself thinking of the days, during the summer of 2010, when we'd sit down and do endless renditions of "I like watermelon" or "I like apples," semi-closed-set exercises that despite their predictability sent me into spirals of frustration. Words sounded unfamiliar, elusive, and my brain ground its wheels and sent sparks flying just to understand the simplest things. One syllable, two syllables, foreign shapeless noises blaring at me, raising tides of pent-up energy as I reached for them but knew not how to hold them in my hand. This time, in the quiet with that oh-so-familiar voice, we actually achieved some semblance of conversational flow.
My mother would make an observational remark, and I'd get it quickly enough to say, "Oh really? How did that go?"
I asked her to repeat words here and there, but always within the context of what I'd heard: "The dog is doing what?" or "She said she'd see you when?" Listening wasn't perfect, but nor was it completely incoherent: in the dense jungle of sound, my mind always had a few strong vines to grasp, and my brain was always able to trace a terrain map of what it had heard.
Toward the end of the conversation, I realized that this kind of fill-in-the-gap is something I do all the time while lipreading. Even in this quiet conversation with a familiar voice, I was able to approach the comprehension threshold that I already achieve with sight. That sound, that listening would ever carry me there! Stunning.
In the past, we've stuck mainly with familiar subject matter even in our open-set conversations, and even that has felt stilted and difficult. This time, we were able to expound upon subjects that I knew very little about. She told me about people she'd recently met, stories they'd told her - completely open-set, unknown material to my ears. Finally, here I understood: acquiring new information through hearing, through language. Is this how it feels?
There was no more - or very little - stumbling back-and-forth through short, disconnected statements uttered only for the purpose of exercise. No more listen and repeat. "Today is Saturday." "Tomorrow is Easter." "I am tired." "You are on vacation today." None of that. I listened to fuller, more complex and coherent sentences and - I can't describe how wonderful this felt - kept up with 80-90% of what my mother was saying. It was like being liberated from elementary beginning-to-read books into the world of prose and literature. That's the only way I can think of to describe it.
Finally, the most exulting, the most elusive feeling of all: the feeling of being able to move beyond meaning to engaging with actual content. The words came more easily to me when I heard them, and I lingered less on their meaning, spent less time slamming my head against the shadowy surface of each word before its sound waves vanished forever. I heard; I understood; I formulated a response. My brain felt increasingly able to process meaning in real time. Returning to the jungle analogy, it was like swinging through the forest canopy on vines, reaching the end of each arc and actually finding another handhold there instead of swinging backward to where I started - or, worse yet, missing and falling to the underbrush below.
Conversational flow: understanding what someone else is saying, easily and effortlessly enough to respond and feel comfortable with the give and take of words. It may not have been perfect this past weekend, but it was far better than I have ever experienced. That sensation of electric auditory back-and-forth felt like a gift. A gift of that mysterious black box inside my skull, calculating sound frequencies and piecing them together and presenting them back to me in a wrapped package. I still don't entirely understand how it happens, still can't entirely believe that it could happen to someone like me.
Three years ago, I would have found this kind of experience incomprehensible. Here's to my nearly three-year-old baby ear (and more posts, like a proud parent, to chronicle its progress)!
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Exercising the Memory Muscle
It's been a while since I've written a proper post - I've found myself consumed with more distractions than ever in the last couple of months, although in a very positive and very healthy way overall. I'm excited to have so many new experiences swinging my way!
Putting that aside for the moment, while having a conversation with my parents via Skype the other day I realized that there has been one very curious, very strange new development recently with my hearing that I haven't blogged about yet. In short, I have a very, very bad auditory memory. Hilariously bad, in fact.
Now, I've blogged about auditory memory before, but mostly referring to the meaning or the context of being able to retrieve and recognize words that I hear. Since I started my CI rehab process from ground zero, or that of having nearly no familiarity with how words actually sound or are supposed to sound, most of my learning process with speech and words has been a process of painstakingly figuring out normal English speech patterns and committing them to some location in my memory. Then I "activate" that memory to recognize words when I come across them at some point in the future. Grossly oversimplified, what I'm hearing in the present moment matches my brain's existing memory map for the corresponding word from somewhere in the past, and there it is - I recognize it and the word presents its meaning to my consciousness. (Actually I don't think this is what happens all the time, since according to this definition I would need to drill every word in the English language over and over again to form the initial memory imprint in my brain - the process seems far more organic, with my brain learning to break down individual sounds to reassemble and recognize words I've never heard before, however familiar they might be to me otherwise. So much going on, it boggles my mind. I just realized the other day how many words I routinely use in high-level written English that have never entered my auditory or spoken world - I have no idea how they're pronounced, how they sound, how I might say them. This appears to me less of a limitation than an opportunity for future discovery.)
The form of auditory memory described in the above paragraph is still improving - the memory for specific sounds and specific words that allows me to recognize speech in real time. I've discovered recently that, contrary to my wildest expectations at the very beginning of the listening process, I'm growing rather skilled at listening to completely or mostly open-set paragraph-length utterances in quiet with a familiar speaker and understanding about 60-80% of what is being said. This is huge. My auditory therapist can speak to me in complete sentences, sometimes several sentences, and while sitting there and letting my auditory memory thrum and guide me through what I'm hearing, I feel the regular click of understanding. Got that. Got that. Got that. Got that, too. Amazing. Except...
Back to auditory memory, placing a different emphasis on "memory." While I feel like I've made leaps and bounds in being able to break down and understand speech as it comes to me in real time, in those controlled situations, there's still another important part to language processing. That is, being able to hold on to everything you've heard long enough to make meaning of it. Which is something that, again, I'm laughably abysmal at.
Let me put this another way. Suppose I'm listening to a long sentence or sequence of words. They click by, and I feel the distant regions of my brain light up and correspond with meaning, and feel as though I'm understanding everything, or nearly everything. That felt great. Then the test comes; my auditory therapist says, "Repeat that back to me." And... I can't. I realize I've forgotten almost everything except the last few words.
But - but I understood those words as I was hearing them! I swear I did. My brain just failed to use whatever pathway to store those words safely away in short-term memory. For strings of about six to eight words long, no problem; the fleeting imprint of auditory memory still allows me to retrieve the entire thing from the beginning and recite it with confidence. But for longer strings of words, or complex sentences with clauses, catalogues, or other syntactical challenges like the ones I'm writing right now, I lose it. I can't remember what I've heard, even if I did hear it and remember the self-satisfied glint of understanding. This doesn't mean my overall memory is bad. Actually, it's excellent - I'm able to look at things and remember them very well even a while later, and always have been. I'm recognizing the difference between the visual and the auditory pathways, between all the uses of memory I've grown accustomed to and the style of memory I'm now asking my brain to use. I've long prided myself on having a good memory - it bemuses me that it could be so bad when I try to listen with it.
Another tough exercise: listen to a string of individual words (example: "cat," "dog," "bird," "chair") and then store them in memory while listening to another phrase or question that forces me to select which of the words classify together and which do not (example: "it is an animal with four legs"). For the preceding examples, the answer would be the first two words, "cat" and "dog" - if I missed the word "animal," I might mistakenly include chair, since it does have four legs. Ditto for missing the words "four legs," at which I might include bird. This exercise requires me to reach back to my auditory memory for the initial sequence, using this new information, and analyze what I've heard using my existing language skills. But I often find that, once I've heard and understood the second part of the exercise, the phrase or question, I reach back and... not all the words are there anymore. Or I struggle to remember them. Maybe I can only remember two or three of them, even though ten seconds ago I was solid on all four. Somewhere, in exerting the auditory pathway, my brain let its previous efforts slip from memory. I'm getting better at this exercise over time, but it remains elusive sometimes, for something so seemingly elementary-level.
Who knew that memory could be such a complex and multifaceted thing? Or that it linked so intimately to speech processing, language, and speech comprehension? I'm experiencing this disjunction firsthand, and I'm in awe of how many things our brains must juggle to execute seemingly the most basic and simple actions. Time to exercise those memory pathways and memory muscles! Someday it will all be connected: auditory memory, sound processing, speech recognition, long and short-term memory, linguistic and syntactical structures, real-time analysis... maybe a little room for daydreaming in there.
Putting that aside for the moment, while having a conversation with my parents via Skype the other day I realized that there has been one very curious, very strange new development recently with my hearing that I haven't blogged about yet. In short, I have a very, very bad auditory memory. Hilariously bad, in fact.
Now, I've blogged about auditory memory before, but mostly referring to the meaning or the context of being able to retrieve and recognize words that I hear. Since I started my CI rehab process from ground zero, or that of having nearly no familiarity with how words actually sound or are supposed to sound, most of my learning process with speech and words has been a process of painstakingly figuring out normal English speech patterns and committing them to some location in my memory. Then I "activate" that memory to recognize words when I come across them at some point in the future. Grossly oversimplified, what I'm hearing in the present moment matches my brain's existing memory map for the corresponding word from somewhere in the past, and there it is - I recognize it and the word presents its meaning to my consciousness. (Actually I don't think this is what happens all the time, since according to this definition I would need to drill every word in the English language over and over again to form the initial memory imprint in my brain - the process seems far more organic, with my brain learning to break down individual sounds to reassemble and recognize words I've never heard before, however familiar they might be to me otherwise. So much going on, it boggles my mind. I just realized the other day how many words I routinely use in high-level written English that have never entered my auditory or spoken world - I have no idea how they're pronounced, how they sound, how I might say them. This appears to me less of a limitation than an opportunity for future discovery.)
The form of auditory memory described in the above paragraph is still improving - the memory for specific sounds and specific words that allows me to recognize speech in real time. I've discovered recently that, contrary to my wildest expectations at the very beginning of the listening process, I'm growing rather skilled at listening to completely or mostly open-set paragraph-length utterances in quiet with a familiar speaker and understanding about 60-80% of what is being said. This is huge. My auditory therapist can speak to me in complete sentences, sometimes several sentences, and while sitting there and letting my auditory memory thrum and guide me through what I'm hearing, I feel the regular click of understanding. Got that. Got that. Got that. Got that, too. Amazing. Except...
Back to auditory memory, placing a different emphasis on "memory." While I feel like I've made leaps and bounds in being able to break down and understand speech as it comes to me in real time, in those controlled situations, there's still another important part to language processing. That is, being able to hold on to everything you've heard long enough to make meaning of it. Which is something that, again, I'm laughably abysmal at.
Let me put this another way. Suppose I'm listening to a long sentence or sequence of words. They click by, and I feel the distant regions of my brain light up and correspond with meaning, and feel as though I'm understanding everything, or nearly everything. That felt great. Then the test comes; my auditory therapist says, "Repeat that back to me." And... I can't. I realize I've forgotten almost everything except the last few words.
But - but I understood those words as I was hearing them! I swear I did. My brain just failed to use whatever pathway to store those words safely away in short-term memory. For strings of about six to eight words long, no problem; the fleeting imprint of auditory memory still allows me to retrieve the entire thing from the beginning and recite it with confidence. But for longer strings of words, or complex sentences with clauses, catalogues, or other syntactical challenges like the ones I'm writing right now, I lose it. I can't remember what I've heard, even if I did hear it and remember the self-satisfied glint of understanding. This doesn't mean my overall memory is bad. Actually, it's excellent - I'm able to look at things and remember them very well even a while later, and always have been. I'm recognizing the difference between the visual and the auditory pathways, between all the uses of memory I've grown accustomed to and the style of memory I'm now asking my brain to use. I've long prided myself on having a good memory - it bemuses me that it could be so bad when I try to listen with it.
Another tough exercise: listen to a string of individual words (example: "cat," "dog," "bird," "chair") and then store them in memory while listening to another phrase or question that forces me to select which of the words classify together and which do not (example: "it is an animal with four legs"). For the preceding examples, the answer would be the first two words, "cat" and "dog" - if I missed the word "animal," I might mistakenly include chair, since it does have four legs. Ditto for missing the words "four legs," at which I might include bird. This exercise requires me to reach back to my auditory memory for the initial sequence, using this new information, and analyze what I've heard using my existing language skills. But I often find that, once I've heard and understood the second part of the exercise, the phrase or question, I reach back and... not all the words are there anymore. Or I struggle to remember them. Maybe I can only remember two or three of them, even though ten seconds ago I was solid on all four. Somewhere, in exerting the auditory pathway, my brain let its previous efforts slip from memory. I'm getting better at this exercise over time, but it remains elusive sometimes, for something so seemingly elementary-level.
Who knew that memory could be such a complex and multifaceted thing? Or that it linked so intimately to speech processing, language, and speech comprehension? I'm experiencing this disjunction firsthand, and I'm in awe of how many things our brains must juggle to execute seemingly the most basic and simple actions. Time to exercise those memory pathways and memory muscles! Someday it will all be connected: auditory memory, sound processing, speech recognition, long and short-term memory, linguistic and syntactical structures, real-time analysis... maybe a little room for daydreaming in there.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
"Seeing at the Speed of Sound"
I'm really happy to report that a revised version of an essay of mine has been published in Stanford magazine as a feature. Check it out here!:
Many thanks to the writers, bloggers, tweeters, etc. who have reposted this across the web. (And be sure to read the sidebar, "Now Hearing This," linked with the main article - I always find it interesting to reflect upon how these experiences with lipreading and conversation have changed since I first wrote this essay nearly three years ago, right before I got my cochlear implant.)
Friday, December 7, 2012
Some Rhodes Reflections
I haven't written on this blog for several months... but that doesn't mean it's been an uneventful fall. Far from it, both in terms of listening-related news and personal developments. I've been able to make some astounding progress with my cochlear implant, but perhaps the most telling factor about how "normal" this hearing business has become in my life is how I've felt gradually less compelled to write about all the breakthroughs. Not that they haven't been big breakthroughs - some of them have blown my mind. To summarize before I get to my bigger news and the things I'm now mulling over:
In October, at the suggestion of my auditory verbal therapist after seeing my most recent audiograms from June, I returned to my audiologist for an experimental remapping. I say experimental for two reasons: because it wasn't a remapping that was called for within my usual appointment plan (technically, I didn't need to go back until June 2013) and also because we were trying something very different from all the mappings I'd had up to that point. Basically, since I was born with a higher-frequency hearing loss, those frequencies have been the most curious/disruptive/difficult for me to get used to with the CI, and they're also the sounds that are the most important for understanding human speech. Hearing vowels is all very well, but most of the crucial consonants that tie words together and make spoken language intelligible: you got it, high-frequency. In an effort to bolster my performance with speech comprehension, my remapping in October "skewed" my CI programming to include a greater emphasis on the higher-frequency part of the auditory spectrum. It also increased my CI sensitivity by a notch. The results, for a few days, made me crazy. I went to bed tired from all the sounds and stimulation. It wasn't that I hadn't heard these sounds before, exactly; it was that they popped out in new ways, and that they were ever-present as they'd never been before. Listening to someone speak became like listening to a symphony of hissing snakes - I mean, consonants.
The first time I went to see my auditory therapist after my new mapping, I sat down and recited full open-set sentences back to her, much more easily than I'd ever been able to do before. Two weeks after that, she surprised me with reading not just single sentences, but entire paragraphs at a time, and once again my brain made the connections, picked up the sounds, and fed me the meaning. Though these paragraphs were composed of simple, declarative sentences, I understood right around 80 percent. It honestly felt like a miracle, or like magic, to be sitting there in that chair having the words come to me so effortlessly. The same thing has kept happening since, and last week she made the declaration that I'm ready to move on to more complex paragraphs - namely, not at elementary school reading level, but something more like, say, my old friend Harry Potter. (That experiment is upcoming in our appointment this week and I admit I'm excited. From speech therapy years ago to my summer of listening to the books on tape, Harry has wound up being my best buddy in all things speech and listening-related.) That meaning, real meaning, can be transmitted via sound instead of only via sight, text, written sentences and paragraphs: I think it will amaze me for the rest of my life. Over Thanksgiving break, while at work, the skills even carried over to the "real world," where I overheard my first phone conversation. It was just like listening to my therapist: I understood almost everything, and the feeling was so surreal. Also while at home over the break, I found that I could understand everything my mother said to me with my back turned, so long as I stopped and remembered to listen.
So, that's where I'm at. I don't think I've experienced such a rapid acceleration of tangible skills since first getting the CI. I want to revisit some of these experiences at some point, but before then my big news from this fall, without further ado:
I've been named a Rhodes scholar. I'll be heading to Oxford next fall to embark on at least two years of study, which is an opportunity so thrilling that it continues to elude my full comprehension. I'm already writing about this elsewhere, but for the purposes of this blog - and also my private thoughts and feelings in the last few days - I'd like to take a moment to contemplate it from a particular perspective.
Longtime readers of this blog might recall the last time I went to Oxford through a Stanford study abroad program, which happened a mere three months after I got my cochlear implant. The decision to go abroad was not an easy one; I was terrified of British accents, finding ASL interpreters in a BSL world, being so far away from home, finding an appropriate support network overseas, and so forth. Fortunately, the decision to apply for the Rhodes came more easily from an accessibility perspective, and I've come to realize that the few months I spent in the UK two years ago empowered me in so many ways. I'm certain that I will feel far more empowered after two years with a Rhodes scholarship, though I'm curious to find out what British accents will sound like to me now. (Maybe I will fall in love with them. You never know!) In fact, my fall of Rhodes application essays and interviews has been its own story of empowerment. Along the way I think I discovered, more strongly than I ever have before, that if I present myself within the full capacity of my abilities and ask other people to help me figure out how to confront the challenges of my deafness, things will fall into place better than I expect. Though I'm still working at many things myself, including this whole hearing-with-the-CI business, I continue to feel more and more convinced that the "disabling" aspects of my deafness need not impact me that strongly if I can shape my situation to suit my needs. I view myself as far, far more abled than disabled, and while challenges can and will continue to arise I know I'll continue to find ways around, or through, them.
Which is why I've been a little mystified by some of this Rhodes business. The Rhodes Trust itself has been beyond supportive, and I'm cheered to have already met some very smart, considerate people who are committed to helping me succeed while at Oxford. (It still feels so surreal to say that!) I've approved of most of the coverage in the media, while raising my eyebrows that my life could be so fascinating to anyone who doesn't know me. I've needed to navigate some requests for interviews by providing remarks via email or meeting someone in person, but I've discovered that whenever I show up to chat with a stranger face-to-face I'm more than able to have an enjoyable and coherent conversation. That feels beyond fantastic. However, some things have continued to convince me that many hearing people just don't know how to address the concept of deafness, or of disability in general.
I wrote in my Rhodes application essay that I wanted to become a writer committed to exploring access, equality and difference, and the nature of communication itself. Stealing from the essay: "Our world often does not know how to talk about these things just as it does not know how to talk about disability, about differing abilities and strengths, distinct personal styles, and challenges." Being thrust into the spotlight, as a deaf person and (sometimes) as an inspiration/role model/etc., has convinced me that the aforementioned statement is true. Hearing people mean well, but they don't know how to refer to someone who is deaf. (Hearing impaired? Hearing loss? Hearing challenged? How to be politically correct?) They don't know how to bring up the subject. I see hesitation in their faces when they ask me about it. Sometimes they don't bring it up at all, but ask other people who know me about it - which makes me feel shortchanged and more offended than if they'd simply expressed their curiosity to my face. They fixate on the details: how do you go to class? how do you ride a horse? how did you learn to speak? how are you even having this conversation with me right now? They marvel that someone who is deaf could have accomplished this. (A backhanded compliment; deaf people aren't so dumb, are they?) They think using a sign language interpreter is a marvelous thing. At least they've fallen short of asking whether I read Braille. (A longtime private joke between me and a few of my interpreters.) Though the reverse is also true: they don't understand what being deaf means and ask me to call them, or give them a phone interview, or make a guest appearance on the radio. Ummm...
I am not writing this post to sigh or complain about the burden of explaining myself. It's just like if I met a highly accomplished blind person; I'd be interested in finding out more about his or her world, which I don't know very much about. But it's the cluelessness, and the occasional fixation on me as deaf first and foremost, that strikes me as strange. Case in point: as I wrote, people do not know how to talk about disability. They simply don't know much about it. The fact that I can be accomplished in so many ways and also be deaf is a rare combination. I know that, and I won't shy away from acknowledging that nor from describing my experiences to other people. However, I don't think the category (successful + deaf) should be such an exception in the mainstream world - accessibility oftentimes just has to get better. My abilities far outweigh my disabilities, and while my deafness is at the very core of my being, it's also a rather monochromatic lens. As someone who does want to write about these issues in the future, I will continue to struggle with this problem of self-representation.
To conclude this post, I can't help but be reminded of several sentences I wrote in an essay when I was sixteen. This essay, titled "Deaf and - Smart?" framed my agony over the phrase "deaf and dumb," something that deeply offended me when I was young. (It still does, but I've learned not to be defined by it. Thank goodness, I and many other deaf people I know seem to have proven it wrong by now!) It got quite a lot of attention at my school at the time, but even now - nearly seven years later - these words continue to ring true:
In October, at the suggestion of my auditory verbal therapist after seeing my most recent audiograms from June, I returned to my audiologist for an experimental remapping. I say experimental for two reasons: because it wasn't a remapping that was called for within my usual appointment plan (technically, I didn't need to go back until June 2013) and also because we were trying something very different from all the mappings I'd had up to that point. Basically, since I was born with a higher-frequency hearing loss, those frequencies have been the most curious/disruptive/difficult for me to get used to with the CI, and they're also the sounds that are the most important for understanding human speech. Hearing vowels is all very well, but most of the crucial consonants that tie words together and make spoken language intelligible: you got it, high-frequency. In an effort to bolster my performance with speech comprehension, my remapping in October "skewed" my CI programming to include a greater emphasis on the higher-frequency part of the auditory spectrum. It also increased my CI sensitivity by a notch. The results, for a few days, made me crazy. I went to bed tired from all the sounds and stimulation. It wasn't that I hadn't heard these sounds before, exactly; it was that they popped out in new ways, and that they were ever-present as they'd never been before. Listening to someone speak became like listening to a symphony of hissing snakes - I mean, consonants.
The first time I went to see my auditory therapist after my new mapping, I sat down and recited full open-set sentences back to her, much more easily than I'd ever been able to do before. Two weeks after that, she surprised me with reading not just single sentences, but entire paragraphs at a time, and once again my brain made the connections, picked up the sounds, and fed me the meaning. Though these paragraphs were composed of simple, declarative sentences, I understood right around 80 percent. It honestly felt like a miracle, or like magic, to be sitting there in that chair having the words come to me so effortlessly. The same thing has kept happening since, and last week she made the declaration that I'm ready to move on to more complex paragraphs - namely, not at elementary school reading level, but something more like, say, my old friend Harry Potter. (That experiment is upcoming in our appointment this week and I admit I'm excited. From speech therapy years ago to my summer of listening to the books on tape, Harry has wound up being my best buddy in all things speech and listening-related.) That meaning, real meaning, can be transmitted via sound instead of only via sight, text, written sentences and paragraphs: I think it will amaze me for the rest of my life. Over Thanksgiving break, while at work, the skills even carried over to the "real world," where I overheard my first phone conversation. It was just like listening to my therapist: I understood almost everything, and the feeling was so surreal. Also while at home over the break, I found that I could understand everything my mother said to me with my back turned, so long as I stopped and remembered to listen.
So, that's where I'm at. I don't think I've experienced such a rapid acceleration of tangible skills since first getting the CI. I want to revisit some of these experiences at some point, but before then my big news from this fall, without further ado:
I've been named a Rhodes scholar. I'll be heading to Oxford next fall to embark on at least two years of study, which is an opportunity so thrilling that it continues to elude my full comprehension. I'm already writing about this elsewhere, but for the purposes of this blog - and also my private thoughts and feelings in the last few days - I'd like to take a moment to contemplate it from a particular perspective.
Longtime readers of this blog might recall the last time I went to Oxford through a Stanford study abroad program, which happened a mere three months after I got my cochlear implant. The decision to go abroad was not an easy one; I was terrified of British accents, finding ASL interpreters in a BSL world, being so far away from home, finding an appropriate support network overseas, and so forth. Fortunately, the decision to apply for the Rhodes came more easily from an accessibility perspective, and I've come to realize that the few months I spent in the UK two years ago empowered me in so many ways. I'm certain that I will feel far more empowered after two years with a Rhodes scholarship, though I'm curious to find out what British accents will sound like to me now. (Maybe I will fall in love with them. You never know!) In fact, my fall of Rhodes application essays and interviews has been its own story of empowerment. Along the way I think I discovered, more strongly than I ever have before, that if I present myself within the full capacity of my abilities and ask other people to help me figure out how to confront the challenges of my deafness, things will fall into place better than I expect. Though I'm still working at many things myself, including this whole hearing-with-the-CI business, I continue to feel more and more convinced that the "disabling" aspects of my deafness need not impact me that strongly if I can shape my situation to suit my needs. I view myself as far, far more abled than disabled, and while challenges can and will continue to arise I know I'll continue to find ways around, or through, them.
Which is why I've been a little mystified by some of this Rhodes business. The Rhodes Trust itself has been beyond supportive, and I'm cheered to have already met some very smart, considerate people who are committed to helping me succeed while at Oxford. (It still feels so surreal to say that!) I've approved of most of the coverage in the media, while raising my eyebrows that my life could be so fascinating to anyone who doesn't know me. I've needed to navigate some requests for interviews by providing remarks via email or meeting someone in person, but I've discovered that whenever I show up to chat with a stranger face-to-face I'm more than able to have an enjoyable and coherent conversation. That feels beyond fantastic. However, some things have continued to convince me that many hearing people just don't know how to address the concept of deafness, or of disability in general.
I wrote in my Rhodes application essay that I wanted to become a writer committed to exploring access, equality and difference, and the nature of communication itself. Stealing from the essay: "Our world often does not know how to talk about these things just as it does not know how to talk about disability, about differing abilities and strengths, distinct personal styles, and challenges." Being thrust into the spotlight, as a deaf person and (sometimes) as an inspiration/role model/etc., has convinced me that the aforementioned statement is true. Hearing people mean well, but they don't know how to refer to someone who is deaf. (Hearing impaired? Hearing loss? Hearing challenged? How to be politically correct?) They don't know how to bring up the subject. I see hesitation in their faces when they ask me about it. Sometimes they don't bring it up at all, but ask other people who know me about it - which makes me feel shortchanged and more offended than if they'd simply expressed their curiosity to my face. They fixate on the details: how do you go to class? how do you ride a horse? how did you learn to speak? how are you even having this conversation with me right now? They marvel that someone who is deaf could have accomplished this. (A backhanded compliment; deaf people aren't so dumb, are they?) They think using a sign language interpreter is a marvelous thing. At least they've fallen short of asking whether I read Braille. (A longtime private joke between me and a few of my interpreters.) Though the reverse is also true: they don't understand what being deaf means and ask me to call them, or give them a phone interview, or make a guest appearance on the radio. Ummm...
I am not writing this post to sigh or complain about the burden of explaining myself. It's just like if I met a highly accomplished blind person; I'd be interested in finding out more about his or her world, which I don't know very much about. But it's the cluelessness, and the occasional fixation on me as deaf first and foremost, that strikes me as strange. Case in point: as I wrote, people do not know how to talk about disability. They simply don't know much about it. The fact that I can be accomplished in so many ways and also be deaf is a rare combination. I know that, and I won't shy away from acknowledging that nor from describing my experiences to other people. However, I don't think the category (successful + deaf) should be such an exception in the mainstream world - accessibility oftentimes just has to get better. My abilities far outweigh my disabilities, and while my deafness is at the very core of my being, it's also a rather monochromatic lens. As someone who does want to write about these issues in the future, I will continue to struggle with this problem of self-representation.
To conclude this post, I can't help but be reminded of several sentences I wrote in an essay when I was sixteen. This essay, titled "Deaf and - Smart?" framed my agony over the phrase "deaf and dumb," something that deeply offended me when I was young. (It still does, but I've learned not to be defined by it. Thank goodness, I and many other deaf people I know seem to have proven it wrong by now!) It got quite a lot of attention at my school at the time, but even now - nearly seven years later - these words continue to ring true:
I don’t think I have ever been able to pinpoint the exact attitude I hold for my deafness. It has always simultaneously been a minor detail and an insurmountable obstacle... I cannot count how many people I have met who have some preconceived notion of deafness or seem determined to treat me a certain way despite the fact that they have never met anyone with my disability. Either they behave as if I were more or less than I am, or a perplexing combination of both... Although thankfully most humans fall more toward the neutral zone between these two extremes, it is rare that I meet the individual who sees me as I am: not made of glass, but not completely independent either. These people, who choose not to view their world only from their limited outlook, are... the rare ones, and the ones whom I have learned to value and cherish.I still find that I cannot pinpoint the exact attitude I have for my deafness - but I'm grateful that my sixteen-year-old self already saw that so clearly, and also saw the enormous use that writing has to confront this ambiguity and to challenge how people perceive disability in the world. I'm also grateful for those special people, those rara avis in my life, especially at this time of looking back but also looking forward to Oxford and beyond. Maybe someday I'll find the words to express what exactly I'd like to say, both about hearing loss and other unrelated things, but fortunately I've got many more years for that.
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
It's About Total Communication
"Do you still use total communication?" an old friend of mine asked me this past week.
It'd been a while since I used the term, but I said (and signed), "Yes. Yes, I do." We sat down and proceeded to catch up over coffee, and it occurred to me that "total communication" is, in fact, the best way to describe the varied conversational strategies I seek and use in my daily life. It also occurred to me that I haven't blogged about it before, at least not beyond a passing remark or two.
The term total communication (it even has its own wikipedia page!) refers to an idea that tries to find a middleground between the long-fraught territories of oral versus sign language-based deaf education. It was in vogue during my stint at the New Mexico School for the Deaf in the early '90s, and I also remember it playing into the philosophy of the summer camp for the deaf I attended from ages nine through 14. (By the time I entered mainstreamed schools in elementary school and onwards, total communication had firmly ingrained itself into my family's lifestyle and there was no going back.) Many of the communication strategies I used in my younger years and continue to use today are closely tied to total communication, which seeks to offer deaf individuals with a range of communication tools and strategies, from sign language (ASL/SEE/pidgin/whatever) to oral and auditory skills, to lipreading to reading and writing, to visual aids and captioning and all the technology that's available at the moment. Even cued speech, too, which I personally don't know but have seen a few friends use. (It's wild.) Basically, any form of communication goes – when you're living with a profound hearing loss, you need to make use of all the tools you can. You need to be multidimensional!
I've been reflecting on this multidimensionality lately, as it continues to be very marked in my life. With the recent medical/treatment/education shift to cochlear implants and other advances in technology, my opinion is that total communication is no less important than it used to be. Deaf culture-based arguments aside, a cochlear implant is not a "fix." It does not completely "cure" a child of his or her deafness, or an adult for that matter. I'm still as deaf as ever once the device switches off. When it's on, it has placed a massive amount of sound waves in my possession, but the sound quality still doesn't equal natural hearing. I still reach for my bag of tricks. As I get older and settle into my new sense of identity with the CI, I find that I'm strangely fond of my ability to switch gears at will. Listening is coming, slowly. I can lipread. If I'm with another deaf person or with a close hearing friend who signs, I sign. I see it, understand it, use it, and find it useful. Otherwise, I speak and that works perfectly well. I watch for nonverbal cues. I dodge any complications with making phone calls by texting and emailing constantly. Depending on the situation and the person, I may find myself communicating in many different ways. Being flexible with communication has empowered me in many different ways, and I find that I'm fondest of the people who can be perceptive and flexible in their communication strategies as well. It's a useful skill.
I keep dwelling over the state of deaf education these days, hoping that the new focus on cochlear implants doesn't smother all the other strategies that can make a deaf individual successful. It scares me to think of dumping a deaf kid into everyday life armed with his or her CI alone. Heck, even if that deaf individual doesn't require sign language after receiving a CI, signing is still worthwhile. (Signing is worthwhile for hearing people too. If only because it's fun.) And, switching to the other hand while returning to the Deaf culture argument, a fiercely sign language-based lifestyle doesn't justify ignoring the prospects of communicating via listening, lipreading, or writing. It's not one thing or another: the more ammo you have in your arsenal, the better. I used to be ambivalent about this idea, as one might find looking back over the very first posts of this blog, but I'm not that way anymore.
I sat down with my friend this past week, as I've sat down with a few other longtime friends this summer. We both talked out loud, we signed, we probably found ourselves lipreading and watching each other closely. It made things easier for both of us. I walked out thinking of a multiple-choice exam in which the answer is "all of the above." Total communication. That's it. The best part was doing it so effortlessly.
One more scenario: this morning I went to drop off a big package at the post office. Standing in line, I grew distracted and didn't realize the clerk was calling me to the counter. Then I grew distracted again and needed to ask him to repeat what he said. These two things must have tipped him off. I saw his expression change a bit. He started speaking more clearly. Then when I was walking off, he raised his open palm to his chin, then extended it outward: clearly the sign for thank you. Once, at a different time in my life, I would have almost kicked myself. Had I been that obvious, made my disability that apparent? Had I failed to pass completely, to integrate myself seamlessly into hearing person land? (Passing is a topic I ought to blog about sometime.) This time, though, no matter. I grinned, somewhat nonsensically signed thank you back, then walked out thinking, I love it when random hearing people do things like that.
Total communication.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
No Sight, But Sound
Right on the heels of my last post, I had a real-world experience in which, yes, I did listen and, yes, it did make a difference. I went to my optometrist two days ago for a routine appointment to get new contact lenses. While sitting with the nurse/technician, giving information about my current medical status, I noticed that my deafness must have somehow become apparent: she suddenly became cautious about communication, started gesticulating to accompany everything she said. At this point in my life, I usually don't care too much when hearing people are painstakingly trying to make themselves understood, but it still can be amusing to watch the signs they invent for things. Some surprisingly accurate and intuitive, and others… Then I took my contacts out, and listening became more essential. I had forgotten to bring my glasses, so I was feeling rather more aware than usual of the information coming in from my ears, as well as hoping that everyone would keep within a certain distance so their faces (and gestures) wouldn't appear too blurry.
After a few elaborate machines testing different dimensions of my eyes and vision, which inevitably made me think of listening booths and how much better I am at these, I returned to my initial room to wait for the optometrist. He arrived, we talked, and then the phoropter (yes, I had to look that word up) descended on my vision. I couldn't look anywhere but straight ahead at the letter chart, the As and Qs (that sometimes looked like Os) and Ts, and I couldn't see his face as he spoke to me, so I prepared to proceed by habit and by what I knew would happen. Read what he showed me, and so on. And, while little other knowledge than that is necessary for an eye exam, I found that this time the communication was different. Before the CI, and even in my early CI days, when I couldn't see someone's face, I'd talk blindly at them, sending out my words to, well, wherever they went. The person would say something back; I'd hear an indistinct muttering from somewhere in space, but no matter; I'd guess what they might have said and carry on. This time, though, looking through the tunnel-vision lens wasn't such a bluntly isolating experience.
"Read this line for me. Okay. What about this one? Is that blurry? Tell me which one is clearer. Do you want to see them again? Now look at this for me." I caught almost every word the optometrist said during that part of the exam. His disembodied voice penetrated my consciousness with startling clarity; instead of bulling my way through the exam – R, S, T, L, N, E, yes, that looks fine, answering nonexistent questions along the way – the interaction took on the feeling of a conversation. I was taking in information through my eyes, but I was also accessing information separately through my ears. Multitasking! We were working through this together. My communication access hadn't cut off with loss of sight.
The exam ended, I regained my full range of vision, I put my contacts back in, said goodbye to the quasi-signing technician, and walked out to the car – just another day at the doctor's office. But even now, thinking of that voice reaching me like a guiding hand extended through empty space: however simple the scenario was, it makes my mind implode with a sort of wonder.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Novus Modus Operandi
There is so much that continues to be unfamiliar to me. My brain continues in its attempts to be plastic – and sometimes it quite astonishingly is, while at other times it runs up against its longtime limitations. This summer, I've continued to notice how my preferences and modus operandi translate into my default interpretations of the world. As I've written about before, given a choice between seeing and listening, my brain's gears seem to be stuck in sighted mode. They grind as I try to prompt them toward sound. Sometimes I find this very frustrating: history stands in my way, through auditory memory but also through the habits formed from experience.
Still, I've noticed that the "half-and-half" approach that manifests itself in my daily conversations is continuing to improve. (It's probably not actually half-and-half. Maybe seventy-thirty, but with decreasing margins between sight and sound.) During meetings at my internship this summer, my coworkers know to face me when they're talking, but occasionally they forget. They'll look down at a computer screen, or away at a whiteboard, or start talking before I can properly see them. At first a part of me grows tense and prepares to ask for repetition. But that's before I realize I've actually heard and understood the words they said in that visionless gap. My brain has switched between modalities, sight and sound, and somehow the information ties together seamlessly. Not always, and not with people who I still find tricky to understand, but often. How dynamic is that?
Another trend from this summer: as I live at home for probably the last time before grad school and real life, my parents have been becoming sneakier about that sight-sound equilibrium. My mother often doesn't make sure I'm looking at her before asking a question anymore. She'll sometimes launch right into speaking, on purpose, often when she knows I can't see her. Sometimes she'll refuse to let me look at her after she begins speaking. After the first twenty years of my life, this is different from the norm. I still remember days when excessive hand-waving and shoulder-tapping was common in our household, and still remember going to deaf camp and other deaf gatherings where session leaders would flash the lights in a room, stamp their feet on the floor, or drum a fist on a table (in addition to waving) when they wanted to get everyone's attention. That's just the way things function in the deaf world. For a long time my natural strategy was to wait for some visual input implying that I should pay attention, then zone on to the new speaker or object with my eyes and all of my energy. My peripheral vision was usually on alert, and still is, but sound played a secondary role. If anything, it could only alert me to some unseen change in the environment that I should look at. It rarely told me what that change in the environment was. I couldn't pay attention to something, or gain any knowledge of transmitted information, without seeing it.
Now, those rules are changing, and my internal rules need to change also. The only thing is, the time it takes for me to shut down the visual sense and start paying attention to sound is about equivalent to the time it takes me to swing my head around and look at it. I hear; I look. I don't hear and listen. Listening needs to become a more primary way of taking in information, but as of now it is still not. My knee-jerk response overrides auditory processing, and by the time I hear someone speaking and then remember to listen the sound is gone. I can't access that sound through memory; I fumbled my real-time chance.
However, if I'm prepared, if I switch off the sight instinct and focus on auditory processing, I can do it. We got back to the car after dinner one night a few weeks ago. My father had forgotten his glasses in the restaurant, so as he ran back inside my mother and I sat in the darkness. One rule of my existence up to this point has been that I don't talk in the dark. I haven't been able to, and I don't think to try. Sitting there, me in the back seat and she in the front passenger seat, my mother started talking. "Turn on the light," I said automatically.
"No," she said. "Listen." I understood that part, and sat silently. No cheating now, in the darkness. My mother kept her phrases and questions short, ten words or less. They addressed parts of our day or our lives at that point in time. But they were otherwise open-set, and I kept on getting them. Actually, I got them with astonishing ease. My focus turned to my ears, we sat there in the dark silence, I listened to her familiar voice: everything seemed to glow with the force of its own unexpectedness.
A few other times, I've sat down at home and intentionally said, "I'm going to have a conversation without looking at you." I need to do it intentionally, to override those old habits. Otherwise I'll never listen instead of seeing. We haven't gone as far as sitting in the dark, but we might as well have. Again, in silence with that familiar voice, knowing that I can ask for repetition if needed: the surprise of being able to do it sneaks up on me every time. I would never have thought, three years ago before I considered getting a cochlear implant, that someday I would be able to talk to my mother just by listening to her. It's far from effortless, but at the same time it's surprisingly easy, given my expectations. I even need to say it out loud to make it feel real: "We're having a conversation. Not just listening drills, but a conversation. And I'm not looking at you."
Now maybe I need to sit down in the dark and the quiet with a few other friends. There I can run my ear over their voices, see what those voices feel like, and start to listen when I can instead of watching.
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