Unsaddled

I am only now realizing how tiresome I must have been back in the days when I had to be the smartest person in the room or die trying. Correcting people’s facts, adding ‘clarification’ that no one asked for, and always, always wanting to have the idea or turn of phrase that everyone kept repeating thereafter. The underlying theme was being right. I really had to be right, there was no middle ground.

I got an email from someone the other day that reminded me of myself when I would let people have it electronically. There’s a chick on her high horse, I thought. Oh, I know about high horses. I not only rode around on one, I kept it in a stall in my office, fed it alfalfa and fresh carrots, and braided its mane when we were to make an especially important appearance.

So this email made me laugh. Oh Lord, I thought, I used to sound like this all the time in meetings and discussions. But I don’t anymore. It got whipped out of me by my hearing loss. You see, if you can’t hear, you better shut the fuck up or you will often look like an idiot. Whether you respond to the right thing, pick up the right thread, riff to the right beat is a crap shoot. And there is nothing worse than letting it fly and watching your crazy words flap around the room like crows just released from a too small cage.

You could say hearing loss took the starch out of me. Sometimes in my little egotistical spinning world of self-pity, I’d sit in a meeting with my cracked hearing and think, you guys don’t know what a force I used to be, which now, I realize, was really saying I used to be more insufferable than you could ever dream.

That was one of the weird blessings of hearing loss. I was forced to gather myself, keep my own counsel, study things and people, and keep my mouth shut a fair amount of the time. I ventured out on the ice only when I was sure of its thickness and then because of the rarity of the occasion, I chose to be spare in my words. Maybe the fear of humiliation lead me to humility.

Even now, after a cochlear implant that has vastly improved my ability to hear and maneuver in the world, the habits of my hearing loss years have stuck. I feel rewired. I used to have something to prove – that I was smart, aggressive, clever, fearless. But now there is nothing to prove. I am the proof.

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Photo by Jez Timms on Unsplash