Month: August 2021

“The Obligatory Deaf Dos and Don’ts Post”

On By Mike U.In deafness, Lip-reading5 Comments

So, during your daily peregrination through life’s mundane drudgery you’ve managed to stumble upon that rarest o’ breeds: a deaf person. Yes, we do exist in the wild—we are not merely urban legends or the figments of some weird and uncanny acid trip. Deaf folks are real, and there’s no need to fear us. So, come out from behind that rock (there’s no hiding from deaf folks—we see you), screw up your courage and take the boldest leap imaginable: communicate with us. It’s not that difficult, and we don’t bite (hard), and who knows, perhaps you’ll come to understand that, hey, we’re humans, too, with unique stories to tell just waiting for a willing ear. All you need is a little patience (a little pizza helps, too) and you may come away from the experience with not only new enlightenment but also a new friend.

But first, a primer. Communicating with deaf and hard-of-hearing people can be challenging for the uninitiated and faint of heart. But fear not, friend—there are tools in the deaf communications tool kit that can help smooth the bumps and assuage the worries you may have when attempting to talk to a deaf person. So, follow along, don’t get lost, take copious notes and use a #2 pencil. Let’s go!

We’re Human Just Like You

Deaf and hard-of-hearing folks may have difficulty understanding speech, but we’re still human, not unlike hearing folks. We want to be treated with the same respect and dignity you show your hearing pals. Don’t talk down to us. Don’t assume we’re mentally challenged just because we have hearing loss and a resulting communication problem. Work with us, be kind and patient. Hearing loss really has no bearing on intelligence. Deaf people must learn things differently than hearing people sometimes, but that difference doesn’t lessen us as humans. Differences and diversity are to be celebrated, not scorned. You’d be surprised just how intelligent deaf folks can be if you give us a chance. When you see us as humans—as equals—you’ve taken your first step to learning how to communicate with us. So, congratulations, and a gold star for you! But don’t get cocky—there’s still much to learn.

Speak Normally

Many hearing people are unsure how to speak to deaf people. Do you shout? Do you jump up and down like some kind of maniac? Do you use fireworks and exotic spices? Pulleys and cogs? Diagrams and pie charts? No, no, no, maybe, and no. The worst thing a hearing person can do is alter the natural way he or she speaks. It really throws us off when you speak too slowly or too loudly or in a disjointed manner. Speech relies on a smooth delivery and a flow of words and ideas. Trying to lip-read a hearing person who is herking and jerking his words can be next to impossible. Lip-reading is exhausting, and the best lip-readers are successful in guessing only about 30% of the time. Shouting or speaking too slowly or in bursts makes our job even more difficult. If we can’t understand something you’ve said, we’ll let you know. Just speak normally, perhaps with a bit of raised volume if necessary, depending on how much difficulty we’re having understanding you. And remember: we’re trying our hardest to keep up with you, so try your best to accommodate us if we ask you to repeat or write down what you’re saying if we get stuck. Lip-reading—at least for me—can be like a train wreck when something goes wrong. My brain will get hung up on one particular word or sound I can’t understand, and everything else after than is just…gone. Train derailed. So, speaking smoothly and naturally can help alleviate this.

Look At Us (No, Really, It’s Sort Of A Requirement)

It goes without saying that lip-reading requires collecting all possible clues and bits of information, both aural and visual. That means we need to see your mug in its full, frightening glory. This may be off-putting for some folks, those among you who are shy or reserved or who fear eye contact. But alas, deaf folks need all the info we can get to try to guess what you’re saying, and that means as much face-time as possible.

Lip-reading isn’t just reading lips. It’s much more complicated than that. Words can be complex things, and the way a mouth forms a sound can vary greatly. Where is the tongue? In the front of the mouth? Back of the teeth? Roof of the mouth? How are the lips shaped? So many words sound exactly alike if you can’t hear all the consonants. Consonants really define words since there are so few vowel sounds. For me, I hear very few consonant sounds, mainly just the sibilant sounds such as the hiss of the letter S. I can’t discriminate most other consonants, so all I can hear are some of the vowels, which really makes it difficult to understand anything anyone is saying. Having a good view of a person’s face allows us to see the mouth more clearly, which helps us try to guess what’s being said.

Then there are the eyes. The ol’ windows o’ the soul. The gatekeepers of dreams. The last bastion before the blasted lands. Or something. Anyway, the eyes are incredibly important in lip-reading because they provide so much context. And not just the eyes, but the eye brows, too, so folks, please refrain from shaving off your eye brows if you ever plan on conversing with a deaf person. You’ll thank me later. Lip-reading by itself provides no context. It’s just sounds emitting from your pie hole. We must rely on your eyes, eye brows and facial expressions to determine context. Imagine saying the same sentence over and over, only changing your facial expression each time. That same sentence would have a different meaning with each utterance. For those who know and use sign language, facial expressions (along with body language) are exaggerated to convey context to prevent misunderstandings. So much is lost when one must rely on lip-reading. Humor, sarcasm, irony and so many other aspects of communication are absent without enough context to clue us in on the intent of a statement. Making sure we can view your face clearly allows us to gather as much intel as possible so we can make an educated guess as to what you’re saying.

Strike A Pose

Body language helps us understand context, too. With the limited info we have when we must rely on lip-reading, body language can fill in many of the blanks. Even if you don’t know sign language, you can still use your hands imaginatively to help get your point across to us. How’s your posture? Ram-rod straight? Slumped like Quasimodo? Open and expressive? Closed off? Demonstrative? Frozen? It helps a lot if you use your entire physical being to communicate. Lip-reading is a real-time event, relying on a steady stream of visual and aural clues being processed as you speak to us, and it is difficult and faulty and tiring and unreliable at best. So, rather than standing there like some strange, cryptic totem, why not get animated and use all of your tools to express yourself? You’ve got more than just one paint brush and you’ve got a palette of several colors, so use all of them to paint your sentences. The more info we have, the more we may understand.

Flex Your Vocabulary

Lip-reading success hinges on how much information we have to work with, so more complex words can sometimes be easier to understand. Single-syllable words are just evil, let me tell you. So many of them sound alike, and they’re elusive and quite naughty and rather ill-tempered and simply don’t like to cooperate.

When speaking to a deaf person, you may need to change your words in order to give more information. Instead of saying “dude,” you could say “individual” or “gentleman” or even “ne’er-do-well.” We may get hung up on that single-syllable word like a burr clover on a sock (I mean, how many words rhyme with “dude?”), but altering your word choice can possibly help us understand what you mean.

A bane of all deaf and hard-of-hearing people is the word discrimination test, wherein we must repeat words without any visual clues (no lip-reading). The more syllables, the more info we have and the better the chance we might guess correctly. “Use different words” was a common refrain of mine when communicating with my mom years ago. Let this be your mantra, Dear Hearing Person, when speaking to deaf folks. After all, what’s good for the goose is good for the aquatic waterfowl.

Be A Hero—Write It Down

Sometimes deaf folks simply can’t understand what’s being said, no matter how many times it’s repeated. I assure you, it’s quite embarrassing to ask someone to repeat himself over and over again. It’s even worse when we still can’t understand and must take the dreaded step of Asking You To Write It Down. This is a bit of a last resort for lip-readers, a sort of surrender, if you will, and it’s embarrassing. It slows down a conversation and inconveniences the speaker, and let me tell you, not every hearing person is keen on writing things down for a deaf person to read.

Plenty of times in my life I’ve come across folks who flat-out refused to write something out for me in order for me to understand. I could never fathom this belligerent attitude. If a blind person is standing on a street corner, waiting to cross the intersection, and asks a seeing person for help, would that seeing person refuse? Likely not. So why is there so much resistance from hearing people when it comes to writing things out for deaf people?

My own parents belonged to this odd, rude group of people who apparently didn’t have the time or the inclination to write stuff down for their own deaf son to read. I can’t explain it. It’s lost on me why people would become upset and refuse such a kindness to help a deaf person understand.

I once ran into a woman at the local Social Services office who became almost livid when I asked if she could please write down what she was saying because after several repeats I still couldn’t understand her. She glared at me, stormed off to her office, scribbled down the info and shoved the paper at me, then retreated. I was both shocked (how rude!) and amused (how bizarre!) by her behavior and thought she should probably not be working in Social Services if she has such disdain for disabled people.

So, hearing folks, I beseech you: if you can, if you have time, write or type what you’re saying. It eliminates confusion and shows compassion on your part for a fellow human who needs a bit of help. I am currently blessed to have a sister who tirelessly writes everything down, a counselor who types everything for me so I can fully understand her, and assorted medical personnel who do the same, willingly and graciously. Heroes, all.

Psst! Don’t Whisper!

My mom had a quirk. She whispered to me all the time. Why, you may ask? Well, I dunno. I asked her the same thing hundreds of times and she never had an answer. She obviously knew I was deaf—she’d witnessed my descent into deafness firsthand—yet for some obscure and inexplicable reason, she continued to whisper to me to the end of her days.

As a deaf guy who has never come to terms with deafness—indeed, who has railed against it for decades to no avail—I never liked being reminded of my deafness. Yet every time my mom spoke to me in a whisper, it served to remind me of all I’d lost. And it bothered me. Time after time I’d have to explain that I was hard-of-hearing and that I couldn’t understand her when she whispered, and I had to do this daily time and again. I don’t know why she did this. Was she afraid my dad would hear her talking to me? Was she in denial about my deafness? Did she simply not care? Was she trolling me? I never got an answer.

She’s been gone for six years now and I still am flabbergasted that she whispered to me for years, knowing full well I couldn’t understand her, and she refused to change. Indeed, several times I told her she needed to change the way she spoke to me if she wanted to communicate with me. She would say, “Why should I have to change the way I talk just so you can understand me?” And I, totally mind-blown, would reply, “Because I can’t change the way I hear in order to understand you.” This scenario played out countless times over the years. Nothing changed, ever. She refused to write things down, she whispered constantly, she would get upset if I asked for help with a phone call, she would ignore all the basic, essential little things that hearing people must understand when talking with deaf people, and she never gave me an answer when I asked why. I’ll never know. Needless to say, don’t whisper to deaf people. We can’t hear you. You must alter the way you speak because we can’t alter the way we hear.

Miscellany (For You Random Folks)

What makes an easy-to-lip-read face? Aside from the proper number of eyeballs, noses and pie holes, it helps if a person is clean-shaven. Facial hair is not only distracting, it also sometimes covers the lips and mouth and makes it impossible to lip-read. I once met a fellow who had a full-fledged I-kid-you-not Grizzly Adams beard. It completely covered his mouth. Gone! Kaput! Pie hole in absentia! He also spoke extremely softly. I never understood a single word he said (and yes, coincidentally, his name was indeed Jeremiah, no kidding; bonus points for those who get the Three Dog Night reference). I always felt badly when he’d try speaking to me because I had absolutely no shot at all of understanding him. I couldn’t ask him to shave his beard, so there wasn’t much I could do. Neatly trimmed facial hair is easier on lip-readers, but again, it’s a situation where you’re trying to squeeze a square peg into a round hole. It’s not going to work.

Sunglasses? Cheap ones, like ZZ Top prefer? They make lip-reading more difficult, too. I’ve always had trouble understanding people who wore shades and I never could figure it out. It’s not like the glasses covered their mouths. It was more a distraction, particularly the mirror-lens sunglasses. Out of curiosity, I googled this years ago and was surprised to learn many deaf people have problems lip-reading those with sunglasses. I think it goes back to the idea of the eyes providing context and emotion, and hiding the eyes deprives lip-readers of a lot of information. I had a girlfriend once who wore shades frequently. I mentioned a few times that I had trouble lip-reading her when she wore them. Did she stop wearing them while taking to me? Nope. Did that relationship last? Nope. (There was more to it than just her shades, but that was a symptom of something deeper.) Any distraction can throw off a lip-reader and cause that aforementioned train derailment. So, if you wear shades and come across a deaf person, please consider removing them for at least the duration of the conversation. Little things can make a big difference.

Chewing gum and eating? Yeah, pretty much impossible to lip-read someone with a mouthful of cheeseburger or Bazooka bubble gum. Things like these are simply not thought about on a conscious level by hearing people accustomed to interacting with other hearing people. It’s another one of those inconveniences where the hearing person must change behaviors in order to accommodate a deaf person. Basic rule o’ thumb: any distraction will derail a conversation with a lip-reading deaf person. A wee bit o’ kindness can fix this dilemma and facilitate an enjoyable and meaningful conversation. So, swallow that cheeseburger or spit out that gum (or the other way around, who cares? Be creative!) and help us understand you.

Background noise can be impossible to deal with for lip-readers. It competes with the few aural clues we’re desperately trying to process during a conversation. So, turn the tv down (or off), stop popping that bubble wrap (party time can wait) and try to ensure a quiet environment for conversing.

One More…And It’s A Biggie

The worst thing you can say to a deaf person is “Never mind,” or “I’ll tell you later.” This is a dagger in a deaf person’s aorta, an ice pick in the kidney of a hard-of-hearing person, a phosphorus grenade in the…well, you get the idea. When a hearing person dismisses a deaf person in such a flip and cavalier manner, it invalidates his very existence. You’re saying, “You’re not important enough for me to deal with your deafness right now.” As a deaf person, it’s hard for me to put into words just how this really feels. Being deaf causes me to be left out of so much in life as it is. Being told I’m not worthy of being included, that my deafness is too big of a drag, what a bummer, dude, go be deaf somewhere else…what can you possibly say in response to that? Honestly, if you’re deaf and have people like that in your life, you need to do some serious reflection and soul-searching. There are kind, compassionate people out there who will accept you as you are and who will never invalidate your life experience. Seek out those good folks. Find comity among those with similar experiences. Not everyone is a boorish jerk.

There are plenty of other tips for dealing with deaf folks, but I’ve rambled on far too long already. Suffice to say, simply, just give us a chance. We’re humans, just like you. We’re unique and we each have a story to tell if you’re willing to listen and willing to accommodate our deafness. You might learn something invaluable, and you might forge a lasting friendship.

“Coda: Farewell to a Dream”

On By Mike U.In deafness21 Comments
Image (c) Jeff Krouskop

I was twenty-six years old when music died. It had been on life-support for a few years, slowly fading yet stubbornly hanging on like some brittle yellow leaf which refuses to let go of the twig and clings hopelessly as autumn turns to winter. When if finally succumbed, it was like losing a close friend. Indeed, it felt like losing my only friend.

When I was eleven, my sixth-grade music teacher, Mrs. Bailey, took it upon herself to teach our class to play the ukulele. Perhaps she was a glutton for punishment, a closet-masochist who secretly delighted in the thought of a discordant, atonal symphony of inattentive brats banging senselessly on cheap instruments. Perhaps she had noble intentions of inspiring greatness in us, nurturing a possible prodigy or two and instilling a life-long love of music in us, the unwashed masses. Or perhaps she was bored. Who knows? And what did it matter? A few weeks of playing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and we’d be done with it and we’d move on to greater, less embarrassing things in life.

But a funny thing happened. I fell in love. I’d never really paid much attention to music up to that point in my life. I was too busy being a baseball fanatic or riding my bike or playing with my G.I. Joe or little green army men to pay much heed to the finer things in life. But there was something about this strange little instrument that spoke to me. And I listened.

My parents took me to the nearest music store, fifty-five miles from the family farm, and bought a $12 ukulele for me. Twelve bucks is a lot of simoleons when you’re eleven years old, and I felt as though I were being entrusted with a Stradivarius or a Stratocaster. It had that funky Hawaiian sound that reminded me of Don Ho and Tiny Tim, and those four black nylon strings seemed to hold some kind of power, some hidden knowledge that beckoned me.

Mrs. Bailey taught us a few rudimentary chords (and by “a few” I mean three or four), which was about all our little sixth-grade pea-brains could handle. We learned a couple of old standards and goofed around and honestly, I think Mrs. Bailey was either deaf or had cotton in her ears because no normal human could remain as cheerful and encouraging around a gaggle of sixth-graders armed with lethal ukuleles as she could.

I had a Mel Bay ukulele instruction book at home and I taught myself a few more chords and immediately set about writing my first song, an epic masterpiece titled “Pickles and Cheese.” Three chords can certainly go to a musician’s head—after all, many classic rock songs contain only three chords—and I was sure I had achieved my masterwork. My mistake was playing it for my mom one day. (Dear Reader, I beseech you, if you ever write a song for the ukulele, DO NOT PLAY IT FOR YOUR MOTHER OR YOU’LL LIVE TO REGRET IT.) For years afterward, every time we’d have visitors at the farm, my mom would excitedly proclaim, “Mike wrote a song on the ukulele called ‘Pickles and Cheese!’ Go get your ukulele and play it for EVERYONE!” And I’d shrink to about half-size and shake my head vigorously and slink off to hide somewhere. It never failed. My magnum opus had become an albatross around my neck and would surely spell my doom lest my mom eventually forget.

About this time I began taking a real interest in guitars. I wanted one desperately, but a guitar was much more expensive than a ukulele. My dad—always prone to making promises he would delightedly and gleefully break—told me he’d buy a guitar for me if I learned to play the ukulele. I’d already learned more than anyone else in my music class and I was eager to learn more because man, I really wanted a guitar. But there was no pleasing my dad, a guy whose soul held no light or warmth or mirth or hope or any sense of keeping his word. As the months rolled by, I continued to teach myself more on the ukulele and my dad refused to hold up his end of the bargain (a recurrent theme throughout my life). I was upset, frustrated that he seemed to take a sick sort of joy in breaking promises, and I eventually reached the point of giving up hope. Then Christmas arrived, and with it an amazing surprise from my mom.

She’d spent $100 of her own money on a used Kay hummingbird acoustic guitar. It wasn’t fancy and the action was too high but it was beautiful, cherry sunburst, and along with a case and a small bag of picks and an instruction book, it contained unlimited hope and potential. I really didn’t know what to think, I was so shocked. My dad was furious, of course, and yelled at my mom for doing something as outrageous as supporting her child’s dreams, and he made it clear to me many times that he’d break the guitar if I played too loudly. Yeah, he really knew how to ruin everything, and his threats and the way he treated my mom for doing something kind for me led to a sense of doom and guilt and embarrassment that would soon manifest itself in an unexpected way.

I played around with the guitar for a few days, then abruptly put it away. Looking at it made me feel worthless, undeserving, and my dad’s threats had destroyed any joy I’d felt when my mom had given it to me. I simply couldn’t bear to play it. So I put it away. For five years. And tried not to think about it, or music, anymore. My mom never said anything about this but I know it hurt her, and I don’t know if she ever understood why I gave up on it. I was too young to accurately articulate what was going on in my head. Fortunately, this hiatus would end just as abruptly as it had begun.

I was sixteen when I suddenly developed the urge to dig my guitar out of the closet. I’d become heavily interested in music by this time and I suppose this was a natural progression. I grabbed the song book that had come with the guitar and sat down in my bedroom and began teaching myself to play. It was as though a switch had been flipped, as if I had only been waiting for the right time to arrive, and that time had finally come. After two straight weeks of teaching myself chords, I began picking up songs off the radio and playing them. My hearing was normal back then and I had a good ear and could play songs after only a listen or two. I gravitated toward guitar-oriented music, of course, and for me this meant bands like Boston, Journey, Kansas, Styx, Rush, Eagles, Badfinger, Jefferson Starship, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin and other rock bands whose songs were carried by the few radio stations I could pick up at the farm. I’d lie in bed at night with my little transistor radio under my pillow and listen to KOMA out of Norman, Oklahoma or X-Rock 80 out of Juarez, Mexico (both Top 40 AM stations) and dream of hearing my own songs play on those stations one day.

The summer of my seventeenth year, I had a job pumping gas at a Texaco station in town. Once again, my dad had made one of his sketchy promises: he would pay for an electric guitar if I’d pay for the amplifier. I’d already picked out the guitar I wanted and set about working to earn the money for the amp. Of course, my dad backed out again and I had to pay for both the amp and most of the guitar. He was angry because I was happy and had kept my end of the deal. When we went to the music store to pick up the guitar and amp, he said, “If you play that thing too loud, I’ll break it!” I mean, this guy had a natural talent for being an asshole. So, with Mr. Guilt Trip having said his piece, I set about exploring the world of the electric guitar.

I was writing music and lyrics by this point, and to say music—and guitar—had become an obsession for me would be quite an understatement. I was living and breathing music. When I wasn’t listening to music, I was playing my guitars. My mom told me many times that she’d lie awake in bed at night, waiting for me to return home from my job at the gas station, because she knew I’d play my guitar for awhile before I went to bed. I had no idea she had been doing this. It was incredibly touching, and I felt as though maybe there was someone who supported me after all.

Music was also my therapy. I grew up in a severely dysfunctional home where there was domestic violence. My dad was a monster who had no qualms about knocking his wife around now and then or making his kids hate themselves. I was my mom’s self-appointed protector. It was my job to make sure my dad couldn’t harm her, and it was an exhausting and never-ending job. And I mean that. Even today, at age fifty-seven, with both my parents gone, I’m still dealing with major depression and PTSD from my childhood and several events that took place involving my dad using physical violence against my mom. I had no close friends so I had no one to talk to about any of this. I was painfully shy and extremely introverted and suffering from more than my share of self-hatred. All I had were my guitars. I would pick them up and disappear into some alternate reality where things were peaceful and there was beauty and kindness and no violent, abusive fathers and no need for young boys to be hyper-vigilant to the point of developing major depression and PTSD. Music was my balm, my elixir, my panacea. I would oftentimes fall asleep with my guitar in my hands, having drifted off to the soothing tranquility of those six magical strings. Music was everything to me. It was life, it was hope, it was healing, it was safety. And it was all too fleeting.

By this point, my mind was made up. I was going to be a musician. I was going to start a band, write original songs, record albums and tour. It was going to be my songs I’d be hearing on KOMA and X-Rock 80, my albums I’d see in music stores, my band’s name on the marquees of venues across the land. Everything was set. All I had to do was continue playing, keep improving and never give up. Nothing could stop me.

Well, they don’t call me Captain Irony for nothing. In late winter of my senior year of high school, I developed meningitis during a basketball tournament at my school. It was my last hurrah as a high school athlete (one who had been relegated to the bench for the most part in football and basketball due to religious discrimination), and I ended up missing the state tournament. I was seriously ill, with a high fever that lasted for about a week. I’d never been that sick prior to that, and haven’t since. I missed two weeks of school. And thus began my journey into deafness.

It started slowly, with my family noticing I was saying, “Huh?” quite often. I began missing words on spelling tests at school—something that never happened before—due to not understanding what word the teacher was saying. As time went by, I began struggling to understand speech and ended up with my first pair of hearing aids (which didn’t help at all) at age twenty-one in 1985. I could still understand music for the most part, although I was beginning to have trouble with it, too. It took me longer to figure out songs, and there were many instances where I couldn’t decipher chord patterns or solos at all. But I kept playing because playing guitar was all I knew at that point. It was everything. The more I improved as a guitarist, the worse my hearing became. I continued writing music and absorbing whatever guitar-related literature I could get my hands on, but in the back of my mind I could feel things slipping away, and it frightened me.

Music died for me in 1990. I was twenty-six. I developed a serious bout of strep throat which infected my ears, and lost a huge chunk of my hearing. I was immediately tone-deaf. I recall trying to play my guitars after that and not being able to differentiate between notes and chords. Everything sounded the same. It felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. Just like that, my dream of being a musician was over.

I felt lost without my guitars. I’d always carried a guitar pick in my pocket everywhere I went. It was my lucky talisman. I reckon its luck had finally run dry. I could no longer improvise. I still knew how to play, but I wasn’t able to understand what I played anymore. I felt like that little sixth-grader noisily strumming the strings of that ukulele so many years ago before I had any idea what I was doing. All I had now were memories of music, memories of playing guitar.

What’s more, I had lost my therapist. I could no longer use my guitars to calm myself and keep myself sane in a crazy world. When I’d try playing, it just made things worse. The sense of loss was palpable and felt so unfair. I wanted to blame someone, something, for this mess, but there was no one to blame. I was sick as a teenager. I fell ill with meningitis during a basketball tournament. Years later, I came down with strep throat. That was it. I was angry at God for a long time (and I still have questions about it, let me tell you). Humans have a need to assign blame when things go wrong in order to maintain the facade of an orderly universe. When bad things occur, if we can pin the blame on someone or something, we set the world to order again and can go about our ways being angry at the person or thing that caused our pain as we grieve. But what to do when no one is at fault? There’s no closure. There are only questions that remain unanswered and which leave us with a sense of a universe that is totally random and merciless.

I have memories. Playing a classical piece in an ensemble at the regional music competition my junior year of high school. Late-night jamming with my drummer buddy Jeff at the school’s music room during freshman year of college. Recording myself jamming and being humbled and shocked and delighted at the reactions of people who listened to those jam tapes. And I still have my guitars, all three of them, in my closet as I type this. They will be with me always, even though I haven’t played them for years. I will remember falling asleep with my guitars in my hands, my arm-hairs vibrating to loud power chords, jamming alone with my eyes closed and my mind far, far away from all the pain and frustration of the real world.

I still have music, of sorts. My mind constantly has some background song or other playing at all times, something that’s been with me for decades—different songs for different occasions. During times of extreme stress, such as my mom’s death, my dad’s physically assaulting me and threatening to kill me, the ending of relationships, music was there in my head, working its soothing magic and holding me together. I can’t play my guitars anymore, nor can I understand any music that’s come out since 1990, but I have all those songs from my past that have never abandoned me. So, in a weird way, music is still the constant in my life, the linchpin, the cornerstone of everything I am. Put simply, despite being deaf, I can’t live without it. Yes, Captain Irony again.