It’s very easy to get comfortable in a rhythm, where you feel like you fit. Whether or not you like that rhythm doesn’t matter, it’s easy. You’re in sync with your life and in rhyme with the people around you. When you face an ongoing challenge, such as hearing loss or chronic illness, it’s common to lose that. You have to constantly find new ways to function and find your old rhythm and rhyme or challenge yourself to find new ones. I try to always choose to work towards new ones, so this last month I’ve purposely pushed myself into some challenging hearing situations – new accents and a new language.
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rehab
Someone like Adele
I’m occasionally known for expressing unpopular opinions on the internet. Here’s another: I don’t really like Adele. I tried, I really did. I like her songs and her style, and she seems like a pretty good person. But I don’t like her voice, which given that she’s a singer, is probably the most important piece. Yet, just about every song I hear on the radio that I don’t already know, sounds like her to me, so I suspect much of this is an aspect of my bionic hearing that my brain hasn’t figured out yet.
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Laurel, Yanny, and the Art of Listening.
The Laurel/Yanny thing that took over the internet was absolutely fascinating to me. It happened to come at a time when I was already challenging myself with focusing on specific sounds, hearing dominance, and sound balance. The number of people saying how weird it is kind of astounded me because it’s what people with hearing loss deal with every day – and then I remembered that “normal” hearing people don’t have any reason to know about or understand the mental aspect of hearing.
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An open letter to Huey Lewis from one who’s been there
Yesterday, one of my favorite 80s pop icons, Huey Lewis, announced that he had to cancel all his 2018 shows due to sudden hearing loss from Ménière‘s Disease. His show in Indianapolis last summer was influential in pushing me forward as a singer in this new stage of my hearing. As a singer who has gone through this myself, I’d like to offer him the following:
This is NOT it.
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Learning to breathe, as walls close in around you
I never knew true anxiety until the moment I lost my hearing. It came in waves, the first couple of times. 5-10 minutes of deafness and vertigo. Then the hearing loss kept lasting longer, until once it just never came back. Those first moments, the first few weeks after, my world had ended. I had no idea how to function or survive. Without a support network, I wouldn’t have.
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