Sometimes, When Battling Shame, It Helps to Have an Ally

These Resound babies are the size of my thumbnail.

Source: Caroline Leavitt

Recently, out of the blue, I received an email from a young woman in Ireland who had read one of my pieces about how I deal with hearing loss and the shame of it, and finally found pride and happiness in finding solutions. Her pain and terror were palpable on the page. She was terrified to get her hearing checked, even though she couldn’t hear people at work, and she had to mumble or nod as if she did. She was only in her thirties, and she worried that people would begin to see her as older, out of touch, or even the worst of the stupid stigmas: stupid.

Caroline to the rescue. I knew all these feelings because I had dealt with them myself. And now that I had conquered them, I wanted to help others do it, too.

This woman had actually read my essays about hearing loss. She knew most of my story, how my hearing had gone wonky after suffering a near-fatal blood illness after giving birth, how I had refused to do anything about it because of the stigma, the shame of not being able to hear properly. I am a pay-it-forward kind of person, and because I had had such help on my own journey, I wanted to help her. My help came from Jennifer Pastiloff, who is a young, drop-dead gorgeous yoga teacher, artist, and writer, and who is deaf. She never lets her hearing stop her, and when I first, with great terror, wrote to her about my issue, she was the one who urged me to claim the shame! “Write about it, put it out into the light, and it will shrivel!” And so, terrified, I did. And to my surprise, I got tons of feedback from people thanking me! “I thought I was alone,” people said. “I was too humiliated.”

Of course, it took me a while to manage the shame. Jennifer really helped. Other people who came forward showing off their own hearing aids helped even more. Mostly because it astonished me how calm they were, how relaxed about something that had plagued me. I now try to pass that calm along, and to educate others about how no one has to suffer. Sometimes, I take out my hearing aids to show people how adorable they are in their gorgeous navy shade. At a noisy restaurant, where none of my friends could quite hear, and they had great hearing, I showed off my app on my phone, which let me adjust the aids so I could focus on the person in front of me and not let the ambient noise drive me crazy. I can switch the sound to hear people in nature, people walking beside other people in a crowd. I can even stream phone calls through my hearing aids!

Look at these beauties from Resound, a global company that keeps innovating, a company Jennifer pointed me towards. They saved my life.

So. when my Irish friend grew more and more frightened, I told her, “Take a friend with you, it will be okay, I promise.” It showed her over email how the Resounds worked and why she’d love them, and by the end of two talks, I had convinced her. “If you’re not ashamed, I won’t be ashamed,” she told me. I showed her this great Resound ad that had a very young hip woman standing in the middle of a noisy food hall, smiling and laughing. “Guess what?” she says. “I usually can’t hear myself think in these places, let alone hear.” Then she pulls back her hair to show off her hearing aids. “But with these babies, I’m rocking!” She’s so happy, so confident. No one in the food hall is looking at her, smirking at her, or whispering. In fact, you can’t help being drawn to her confidence, and you can’t help being confidant, too

And maybe that’s one of the secrets of being ashamed of any sort of disability. You feel different. You feel less than. And while facing that can free you, passing it on to others who are struggling truly helps both of you—and people who may be a tad judgy when they should be as ebullient as I am that there is now technology that truly, truly, helps.

I’m proud that I helped myself. But the truth is, I’m prouder that I helped my brand-new friend in Ireland. In fact, I’m going to check in on her and cheerlead her right now.