Sitting under the hair dryer at the salon, giving my highlights their five-minute boost before the foils were removed and my hair was washed, I couldn’t hear the music that was playing in the large room nor the stylists and other customers talking. This must be what it is like to be deaf, I realized.
I concentrated on this, fully experiencing the loss of this sense. I tried to see better, trying to duplicate being deaf but with normal sight. I closed my eyes and instantly Helen Keller came to mind. I forced myself not to open them, fighting the tremendous level of discomfort. Raising my eyelids, I revisited a question I have asked myself multiple times: would I rather have lost my hearing than my vision? The answer has always been yes; as it was now from my chair beneath the heated domed helmet.
Of course things went the other way. If they had not, who knows what my life would be like. I would be able to do all the things I no longer can because of my visual impairment. But then I am sure I cannot imagine what all the losses would be without sound, just as no amount of imagining would have captured what being legally blind would be like until it happened.
What I should ask myself is what would life be like if humans didn’t have these kind of thoughts? Is it a good or bad thing to be drawn in the “what if” direction? I remember doing “What If” tables in Excel in one of my former jobs, but that was a planning tool, not after-the-fact conjecture.
Ironically, I used to love an Excel spreadsheet, now they are very difficult for me to do with my limited sight. But if I had lost my hearing instead . . .
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