Quiet on the Outside, Loud on the Inside

The first thing nobody tells you about losing your hearing: you don't lose the sound. You gain one.

For most of my life, I was the one who listened.

The friend people called when they needed to talk and someone to listen. The one that really listened and gave good advise. The one who read the room, caught the thing left unsaid, knew where everyone was sitting and who needed what. I even built a career on it and have worked fifteen years in HR, became a certified coach, a natural one. Giving career advise, solving grievance and being people centric was my strength. Listening was the thing I was good at. It was, in a way, who I was.

Then, on an ordinary December evening in Dubai, the listening broke. And the irony struck me in the ear.

It happened in two shots. The first was very light. Over a dinner with friends, SS's amazing food on the table, a bottle of red open. Glasses up for the cheers, and a small pop in my right ear, a flicker of dizziness. I went upstairs lay down for it to pass, I slept, woke up the next day fine. A doctor gave me pills for the vertigo and told me not to worry.

The second shot came later that day, while I was pulling on a pair of jeans preparing to go to a yearly Christmas gathering over some friends. the same pop, just more intese and this time it didn't pass. The room turned. Not the spinning you get from too much wine, the other kind, the kind where the floor stops being reliable and you go down and can't get back up without going down again. SS found me on the floor, eyes rolling, struggling to get up. We went to the hospital, light was unbearable and everything was spinning. After several hours, injections, lack of understanding of what is happening to me, doctors not understanding much either, I vomited in the parking bay before we reached the door of the car to go back home.

That was the night. But the night isn't the story. The story is what was waiting for me on the other side of it.

Here is the thing nobody warns you about. When you lose your hearing this way, you expect silence. A side that's gone dark. A quiet half of the world. That would have been survivable. Sad, but very much survivable.

That is not what happens.

What happens is that the brain, handed a dead channel, refuses to accept the emptiness. It fills it. It reaches into the silence and it manufactures a horrible sound, I call it Miss T. That sound never, ever stops. Not for a second unfortunately. Not in eleven years. As I write this sentence, it is here, in my right ear, the way it has been here every waking and sleeping moment since 2015. And funny enough, when I mention it or talk about it, it just gets louder.

So no. I did not go quiet. To everyone around me, it looked like I withdrew as i got tired, got short, stopped coming to things, stopped being the guy who lit up a room full of people. I even started interrupting without letting people finish their sentences and got frustrated very quickly. They saw a man going quiet.

Inside, it was the loudest it had ever been.

That gap, between the quiet they saw and the noise I lived in, is the loneliest place I have ever stood. Because you cannot point to it and it is very hard to explain. There's no cast, no scar, no wheelchair, nothing that tells the people who love you something is happening to him right now, in this moment, that he cannot turn off, that he is struggling with. You just look like you've changed. Like you've become difficult. Distant. Less fun.

And the truth you can't make them feel is that you are running a marathon, all day, every day, that no one else can see. One ear doing the work of two. A sound competing with every voice in every room. A brain so tired by mid-afternoon that it has nothing left for the people who deserve the best of you, even the ones you love the most.

I spent years angry that nobody understood. It took me a long time to land on the obvious: how could they? Nobody had ever given them the words. Nobody had given them to me either. I sat in soundproof booths fifteen times over a decade. I read the studies. And in all of it, there was almost nothing that told me what this actually felt like from the inside, and even less that I could hand to my mother, my kids, the person I was married to, and say: here, this is where I am, and this is what I am going through.

So that's what this is. That's the whole reason I'm writing.

Not to be sad in public. Not for sympathy as I've made my peace, mostly, and I'll get to the part where it gets better, because it does. Not easier, but better. I'm writing because there is a version of me eleven years ago, newly broken and certain he was alone, who needed to read exactly this. And because somewhere right now there's a person putting on their jeans, about to feel a pop in their ear that's going to change everything, and the people around them are going to need words none of them have yet.

I went quiet on the outside. I'm going to be loud about it here.

Come in. It's noisy where I am, but you won't be alone in it.