Finding silence in a world of screaming voices

The world has been loud lately - screaming with pain that demands to make itself known. The news is plagued with people who are hurting, who look to find a voice, to seek justice, to create peace.

Working in journalism can be a frustrating thing at times. There are moments when all I want is to turn off the news, but to do so would be irresponsible of me. Not only as a journalist, but as a human being. I can't bring myself to turn a blind eye to suffering simply because I don't want to feel even a modicum of what they must be going through.

So I seek other ways to create silence for myself while continuing to tune in. It's not always easy, as I crave stimulation in the same way that I crave hot tea, doughnuts, or a slice of pizza from OIP. I could attribute that to growing up in a generation of instant gratification, but truth be told, I can't ever remember a time when that was different for me, even before the invention of the internet. 

I was that preteen sitting on a couch, reading a book while the television played in the background. I was the annoying kid in the backseat blaring my Walkman because the monotony of sitting in silence was too much for me. Even when I'm writing, I rarely do so in silence. Sometimes I have to trade in my everyday music with something a little more instrumental so I'm not distracted by the words, but there is still always something playing in the background. 

But just as I crave stimulation, I crave silence, maybe more so now than ever. But I'm used to my world of stimulation, so sometimes I don't recognize the need for quiet until I'm desperate for it.

I spent a lot of my life living with moderate hearing loss. I did the whole multiple-surgeries-thing and the tubes-thing, but my ears always seemed to rebel and go back to the way they were (which also has to do with the cleft palate I was born with, but that's a longer story). I was fitted with hearing aids a little over a year ago, but I was relatively high-functioning before I had them. I struggled with deeper voices and sounds that weren't nearby. I missed some conversation, though. I learned to read lips pretty well (which I'm still pretty good at) and became accustomed to closed captioning so that my tendency to turn the TV up loud didn't bother anyone else.

I knew I was missing out, but I didn't really understand the magnitude of what I couldn't hear until I was hearing it.

The first time I put them in was pretty overwhelming, which was surprising to me. I'm not deaf, not anywhere close to being deaf, and yet there were so many sounds I wasn't processing. Suddenly I could hear it raining outside, could hear footsteps approaching, could hear someone talking to me that I wasn't facing. I could hear the music playing in a store, could finally stop asking my friends what song they were humming along to.

There were quite a few times, actually, where I was startled by something so completely normal because I hadn't heard it before. There was one night I was completely rattled by the wind before I figured out what it was. Another day (my friends get a kick out of this story), I came home from work, flicked everything on, changed my clothes, etc. and spent about 15 minutes trying to figure out the source of the loud humming sound. Was it coming from outside? It couldn't be my TV because that wasn't on. And neither was my Macbook Pro, which has been known to whir obnoxiously in its old age.

And wouldn't you know it? It was my ceiling fan.

Needless to say, using my hearing aids was a gradual process. I'd put them in for a few hours and take them out a little while later, exhausted by all the new things I was hearing. WHY was the world so loud?

Of course I can't imagine my life without them now, but when I'm grasping for that quiet, I take them out. Last night I started a new book and spent a couple of hours reading in silence - no hearing aids, no music, no tv - just quiet. Everything was still, calm. I could feel all the knots inside of me unclenching, a reminder that unplugging - both literally and figuratively, in my case - was something I needed to start doing more often.

You can't turn off the world - nor should you, for that matter - but every now and again, you just have to set it on mute and sort yourself out.