Back in the Before Times when I worked in an open office, from 9 to 5 I’d plug myself into my tangled wire headphones and listen to Spotify every minute that I didn’t have to speak to someone. I tore through albums, turning up the volume and tuning out the office soundtrack. After half a year at that job, the guy who sat next to me confessed that he could hear every song I played, from Lil Nas X to Little Green. (Good thing I have excellent taste in music.)
I was a little embarrassed. I know that I listen to music too loud, have been to too many concerts without earplugs, but it never seemed like a problem until sometime in 2019 when I realized I was having trouble hearing. I kept having to ask a friend to repeat herself while we ran next to each other. My roommates spoke to me from the other room and I couldn’t make sense of what they were saying. My boyfriend would say something right next to me in bed and I couldn’t understand.
Words sounded like English, but I couldn’t parse them.
I’d often make guesses. “What’s porkie?” I asked when my friend joked that the portapotties no one seemed to be coming out of were “portkeys.”
Another time: “Your work is still boiling?” I asked my sister. “No,” she said, peering up from her bowl of shrimp scampi, “My fork is so oily.”
My ex didn’t like it when I hypothesized like that. “I’d rather you just ask me to repeat what I said than make a guess” he said, after I interrupted his sentence to clarify, “Pike mom?” when what he’d said was “pipe bomb.”
So I went to the doctor. “I can’t hear what people are saying to me,” I told the nurse practitioner probing the inside of my ear with a chilly otoscope. She found a small amount of fluid in my eustachian tube, prescribed me a steroid, and told me to come back if the problem continued.
The problem continued.
I got a referral to see an ENT, but by this time, we were in the pandemic. My visit was delayed two months, then changed to a telehealth session, and when they couldn’t figure out what was going on with my ears by talking to me for five minutes through my phone screen, I finally finagled an in-person visit.
The test proctor at the audiologist’s office closed me into a soundproof cube and it was like my ears went dark. I’d never been anywhere that quiet; every noise was absorbed into the thick padded walls. The air felt heavier than it had in the hallway. I heard blood rushing through every vessel in my body, then thought I had imagined it.
Through a panel of glass, the proctor instructed me to wear a pair of headphones, then raise my hand as I heard beeps pitched higher and higher. She read words to me that I had to repeat back. Then the same exercise, but with background noise, a mess of sound hurled at me while I was supposed to pick through the ruckus of traffic and restaurant chatter to parse some pristine, intelligible sentence. The prize was perfect hearing (or at least an adult telling me good job).
After all the tests, the proctor told me my hearing wasn’t that bad. A little worse than average on one side. Nothing to be too concerned about. I waited for the audiologist to give me a more robust diagnosis to cling to, but when I finally spoke to him, he told me my ears were fine. It was a problem in my auditory cortex, he said. I needed to try harder. And then he sent me back into a world of masked people with the futile advice that I should focus on the movement of their mouths—mouths I could not see.
I’d gone into this appointment hoping for a definitive diagnosis and solution. I left feeling like I’d made it all up—that made me question a lot of things: Am I just bad at listening? Am I selectively missing out on what the rest of the world is experiencing? Did I mess up that patient’s insurance number because there’s a problem with my brain or because it’s impossible to tell the difference between “M” and “N” on a flip phone with bad service in the back of a cement hallway? Fundamentally: Is this a problem of my own making?
In the years since that trip to the audiologist, I have tried Trying Harder and it has not helped me hear better. Subtitles help. So does Asking People to Repeat Themselves and Using Context Clues. Guessing what someone has said works about a quarter of the time, and occasionally it provides comic relief, but more often leaves me feeling silly and just as unsure about what was said.
Now I’m trying something different. In Annie Dillard’s essay “Seeing,” she writes about two ways of seeing the world. The first is with a voracious gaze, attuned to every detail of the world. Dillard observes a natural scene and writes,
I look at the lighted creek bottom: snail tracks tunnel the mud in quavering curves. A crayfish jerks, but by the time I absorb what has happened, he’s gone in a billowing smokescreen of silt.
The second approach to seeing is more abstract, as Dillard writes, a “kind of seeing that involves a letting go.”
She writes again about watching the creek, how she tries to catch the glint of light on the silver backs of shiner fish, but keeps missing it because every flash of reflected light occurs wherever she isn’t looking. Dillard writes,
So I blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s tuning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone.
With a softer gaze, less hungry eyes, Dillard dissolves into the world she observes.
I want so desperately to make sense of my world, and when I fail, I flounder. It’s isolating not to be able to hear, and I don’t want to be left behind, so I reach out wildly and grasp onto whatever I think I first hear—pike mom or porkie.
And once I’m aware that my perception of the world is different than most other people’s, I feel enormous pressure to diagnose. Sometimes it’s helpful to have language and knowledge to validate and make sense of our individual experiences. But sometimes it means going to the doctor and coming away with the advice of an old white man that I’m not trying hard enough.
An alternative to doubling down is to unfocus my ears. Try less hard. Let the sound reach me however it reaches me—a kind of hearing that, in Dillard’s words, involves a letting go. I don’t expect that this method will improve my overall comprehension of speech. But I do think it opens the door to hearing layers of life that I might otherwise chalk up to background noise.
Every Saturday night at 5, an ensemble of marimba players practices in our basement. We call it Marimba O’Clock. By the time the weekly Saturday rehearsal rolls around, I am never in the mood for marimbas, but I’m treating it as an exercise in unfocusing my ears. There is no pressure to hear it a certain way, no need to make sense of the noise. Mellow percussive reverb makes its way to us, three stories above, and my only job is to absorb the sound, not interpret it or raise my hand as the pitch goes higher.
Last Wednesday I was awoken by the crash of aluminum cans being poured into a recycling truck. After a moment of brief annoyance, it struck me as a sort of offbeat auditory reminder that it was Wednesday.
It’s easy to miss these cues while waiting for a phone or a friend to tell me what day it is, expecting that the answers lie in language, written or spoken. I tend to prioritize speech above other sounds, and I’ve been trained to pick words out from acoustic pandemonium (though I fail often, evidently). But every soundmaker is just a vibrating body, setting in motion the surrounding particles that eventually reach my eardrum: proof that I can hear, that I am here.
Fortnightly Faves
For your listening pleasure, here’s a reader-recommended single released by Chelsea Jade last month. Guaranteed to drive the cynic out of you for 3 minutes and 17 seconds.
I listened to all of The Trojan Horse Affair this past week, and if you haven’t started it, let this be a sign.
The best $78.51 I ever spent: A knife just like my grandfather’s
Apricot jam. Makes me feel like I’m eating sunshine.
It seems like everyone is reading Jennifer Senior’s It’s your friends that break your heart, an evocative essay which inspired me to reach out to my writing group that disbanded at the start of the pandemic. When they all emailed back, it made my week. Go hit up your friends!
In "real life" I work for an airline. I had a long post written out, but it felt like I was overwriting your story, so I just want to make a couple of points instead:
A lifetime of shows and working on a flight line has me in the same situation you're facing. I also perform annual audiograms for my coworkers. EVERYONE comes in looking for a definitive answer, even if it's just "everything looks good."
I (and countless others) are right there with you. Masks and a world full of Plexiglass have robbed us of some of the hacks we'd relied on to compensate.
Mostly, I just want you to know that you're not alone. It's easy to feel isolated, even if logically we know better.
Good luck to you and I hope you get another opinion from someone who is a better observer and listener. So much in life is our instinct. We encounter so many people who are "experts" and we are supposed to trust them. We don't have to be audiologists ourselves to be able to tell when ours isn't listening. Finding a great doctor sometimes takes a while.