Everything here has happened to me before, some more than others. I don’t want to present this as a typical day, it certainly isn’t. For a long time, I thought a lot of these struggles were just me. Several years ago I found a “day in the life” description like this somewhere, and felt overwhelmed at how much it resonated. I tried to find it again, and never could. That was when I first decided to make a blog of my own.
I slept in. The alarm went off, but I didn’t hear it because I was laying on my good ear. After rushing to get dressed, I’m off to work. I pull into a drive thru for breakfast. Ordering is fine, until he asks me a question. Drive thru speakers already sound terrible, but I have to contort my body all the way around to point my right ear out the window so I can hear well enough to answer.
At work it’s business as usual. Everyone knows now to move to my right side to talk to me, and I appreciate it. Jeff still tells people about when I first started and he sat next to me. He tried talking to me a few times, and thought I was just a jerk and ignoring him. I’ve learned to tell people earlier since then.
I take a call from a client, which means I’m cut off from everything else happening around me. The call lasts forever, and my ear is sore from holding the phone in the same place for so long. I find myself reminiscing about when I could switch the phone to my other ear. Kind of a weird thing to be nostalgic about.
It’s someone’s birthday, so we go out to lunch. Again, my team is good about saving me that corner seat so I can hear better, but the restaurant has high ceilings and it’s pretty crowded, so all the voices blend together anyway. The person next to me nudges me because the server is standing there asking for my order. I focus on reading her lips to help understand, but it becomes awkwardly obvious that she thinks I’m staring a little lower than that.
After work I stop at the store. At checkout I turn my head to the side and ask the cashier to repeat herself. She does, and speaks overly loud and slow. I know she’s trying to be considerate, but it still makes me feel stupid. Next I head to baseball practice; I coach my son’s team. Every time a kid calls “coach” I have to look around until I meet one of their eyes, because I have no idea what direction it came from.
My wife and I have a dinner date with some friends. The conversation is fast, with a lot of back and forth. I follow most of it, but several times I laugh at jokes I didn’t actually hear, just to avoid interrupting the flow. Toward the end a live music set starts up, two guys with guitars. They are good, which is lucky, because there is no hope of me hearing any more of the conversation.
By the time we get home I’m mentally exhausted from focusing on separating words from noise. I take the dog for a quiet walk around the neighborhood. A neighbor is out front and says something about the dog and laughs, so I laugh too and hurry on.
Yeah, this is a pretty dramatic day. A day this crazy is pretty rare, but every day of my life I make adjustments. Most of these are just inconvenient; a lot of the time I don’t even realize. I don’t want to give the wrong idea, either. Life is still great. At the same time though, it can feel very isolating, and I think it’s important to recognize that, and help those close to you understand so you can find ways to cope.