In A Soundless World: Deaf Life

It's painful today, agitating, infuriating, my deafness. In many ways its directly hard to describe how it begins or why the feeling rises, and I know at this point it hasn't climaxed, but it's building.

You associate some things you do with noise, yes, sound? Whether you're hammering or speaking, or chopping vegetables, typing on your keyboard or walking through the snow. Your mind tells you sounds are associated with these things. For those of us who lost our hearing, once having it, sometimes accutely you feel the lost. Like something or someone beloved who has died, and you expect it to move, to stop pretending, stop being so still!

You begin to lose it then when you know it's not going to happen, but you keep hoping, you start to beg, to entreat, to demand, to scream! No movement, no word, motion or acknowledgement, it's gone. The cold settles and slides through your veins, your brains. You're alone in this. You're alone inside yourself, your head, your world. And no fury, no mad action, or weeping, nothing you can do changes it, but your body can't be still, you can't be still.

Most of the time that's oki, that's total reality which I ask no questions of. It simply is. Despite the fact, in my case, deafness could have been prevented with proper and timely treatment of a childhood illness, and despite surgery later in my life, it could only minimally be corrected. But blame is pointless and a waste of time, as Khalil Gibran said, "Life goes not backwards, nor tarries with yesterday", yet the natural instinct is to lament loss when the need comes upon you, be it something which happened decades ago or scarcely passed a minute before. I believe one shouldn't repress such emotions, nor let anyone guilt them into hiding feelings.

So I feel like ripping my hair, or smashing all the crockery or turning over tables. I want noise, noise, noise! In my head the colours whirl madly, and the tingling sensation inside your nose that precludes tears won't go away, so I weep. I cannot rip at my hair for I love it too much, nor smash the crockery, (well I could but I would be in trouble), and turned over tables only later have to be righted. I would go to loving arms, and demand them around me, to climb all over and bite and kiss, and be taken fiercely. I've learned different ways of dealing when this grief comes over me.

Before I could become destructive, irrational, not cognizant of why I was really angry, but instead taking it out on another or jetting off in some crazy direction with no explanation, pushing even the smallest disagreement into a confrontation so I could be distracted from my frustrations. I would run and run until I was exhausted, collapsing in some place I'd never been, among people I did not know. I had to learn. I had to learn to accept comfort and not seek stronger pain to counter that which erupts in my soul.

It is not madness. There is no need to be afraid. This is just reality for some of us, whether it's another like myself who is deaf, or someone who has lost a leg or an eye, or a beloved. It is emotion that needs release: the grief, the loss, the agony, needs to scream in its soundless voice so it can become quiet again, and next time, scream less.