Grief filled me up tonight as I felt powerless over the overflow of noise during the last few days. More specifically, the echoes, crowd noise, and fast pace of poorly insulated rooms – restaurants, stores, and other areas where the focus is on visual appeal rather than auditory clarity.
It’s been well established that an overly noisy environment for a hard-of-hearing person, such as myself, makes it harder to understand others. But besides that, there’s the fatigue that overwhelms the system. People who have normal hearing levels also have difficulty in noise, but the extreme fatigue doesn’t hit them as it hits someone like me.
I hate lamenting, but now I must. I cannot both throw the ball and catch it. I can’t be perfect all the time. People with hearing loss often strive for perfection and burden themselves completely to compete. But in reality this doesn’t work out as we seek refuge in our beds before nighttime as we try to keep up.
Indeed, these fatigue attacks can be avoided and I put too much on myself. But we are all imperfect and thus such a situation cannot be realistically avoided all the time.
Indeed, learning new sounds has made these situations more frequent and as time goes by it’ll all get much better. But it’s times like these that remind me of how isolating the world can be and how paralyzed I sometimes feel. This past week, I’ve had a marathon of tough events and thus have succumbed to fatigue and sadness.
But I shall rise again regardless. In this blog, I must keep track of times I’m both feeling great and feeling otherwise.
