Car Note

It was like old times.

I fled to my car, my beloved old Thunderbird. Behind my big sunglasses, I let my eyes fill up just like they used to. It all came back to me. How it felt moving through the world unable to hear or understand what people were saying. It had been months since I’d felt that way. Estranged from public life. Exiled.

I’d volunteered to be an interview coach for a women’s employment event. The morning went well, speakers and such, small talk that didn’t matter. And the interviewers were sent to tables to sit with interviewees while a speaker reviewed tips and strategies for impressing employers. A woman turned to me at the table and introduced herself. The din in the room, the layers upon layers of voices and chairs moving and doors opening and closing, the cacophony surrounded my head like bandages on a mortally wounded soldier.

I heard just part of what she said. She told me she was also an interviewer, apparently thinking that I would assume she was a job seeker. It was no surprise. Practically all of the interviewers were white and the job seekers were black. It was a neon fact, so glaringly obvious that it was a surprise no sirens went off. She talked more but I could make out almost nothing. I nodded a bit and then she got up and left. When the interview time came, I turned to find another interviewer already at the table about to start interviewing our lone job seeker.

There was no one for me to interview. Just as well, I thought. A woman trying out her interview skills deserves to be heard. She deserves more than an unwitting nod. She deserves all my experience and judgement. She deserves the immense well of kindness and regard I have for people who face huge challenges. She deserves my guidance and encouragement. But I knew I couldn’t give it to her, not there. I wouldn’t be able to hear her well enough.

So after the facilitator told me that they had “more volunteers than they knew what to do with,” I put on my coat and headed for the door. Just like I used to. Can’t hear? Flee.

I am so disabled.

I am so disabled.

I am so disabled.

This used to be my mantra. I remember walking to my car after meetings, each step a cadence, I am so disabled, with the self-pity and sorrow beating on the pavement like little hammers. I always tried to be proud in my deafness. It was an act.  And then I received a cochlear implant and I was cured. Thousands of dollars of hearing technology made me part of the hearing world. Except it didn’t. Not always. Not this day.

It’s going to kill me, I thought, thinking this way, being in this old place, thinking I am done for, gone, finished, just when I’d convinced myself I could re-enter public life and be safe. There would be no more fleeing for me, no more little hammers. Except there were. They beat out the old cadence, I am so disabled, I am so disabled, I am so disabled.

No. I found an index card in my bag and wrote on it what I needed to remember from that day going forward.

Don’t go down the rabbit hole of stuff you can’t do.

This is my new mantra, my protection from exile, the way I’ll silence those little hammers. I won’t go back to where I was. No matter what.