Songbirds Still Exist

Sixty years ago I seriously damaged my hearing. Since then, it doesn’t improve. It goes downhill with age. This year, after giving up on less expensive solutions that didn’t work, I gulped hard and laid down six thousand dollars for top of the line hearing aids. They work! They really work!

But hearing doesn’t come back in zero time. The brain needs to be retrained. One of the first things I noticed were ordinary sounds that I found annoying. For example, the sound of water splashing in a sink. I also learned that many of my electronic gadgets make beeping noises that I didn’t know about.

But it took several months before I noticed the pleasant sound of songbirds riding my bicycle in the country. Reflecting on that, I realized that I assumed that songbirds went extinct decades ago, probably because of climate change.

Of course, my wife was delighted because my improved hearing made her life much easier. She has a diminutive voice. Speaking louder was uncomfortable for her. It could be fair to say that she likes these hearing aids more than I do. But I still have to face her and see her lips moving to hear her reliably.

Finally, I came to understand that the last stage of recovery from bad hearing involves deeply seated habits and adaptations to poor hearing. It may take me more than a year, plus effort, plus planning, plus some specific activities to accomplish those changes.

People are social animals. We want to be liked. We certainly don’t like to be shunned. So what happens if you are in a group conversation where you don’t comprehend everything being said? You can say, “What?” or the passive “I missed that, please say it again.” or the aggressive “Speak up!” But if you say those things too often, it become burdensome on the group to include you as a member. Consciously or unconsciously, they become weary of including you in the group. Perhaps it was a mistake not to advertise disability and seek accommodation as a victim, but I didn’t do that.

The natural adaptation is to accept poor comprehension and fake it. The trouble with that is inevitably, you get caught faking. That is awkward. I recall one time in a group when I interjected, “Have you considered X?” There was a long pause. Finally, one of the others said, “Dick. That’s what we have been talking about for the past 30 minutes.”

At work, I had a reputation for being stand-offish, even anti-social. The reason was that I couldn’t socialize with my peers at a party or having a beer after work. I’ll never forget one horrible experience. I was a project manager. After a notable achievement, it was my duty to treat the project team to some beers after work. Soon after entering the noisy bar, I regretted it. I couldn’t understand a single word of the conversation. It was so bad that my discomfort became known to everyone at the table, because I just sat there silent and wooden wishing that the evening would end. I feared that the others interpreted my discomfort as being caused by my personal dislike of them. It wasn’t them I disliked, but rather the noisy bar. It was an utterly humiliating experience. An outing intended to promote camaraderie, instead destroyed my relationship with the team.

My family of course knows all about my hearing. But even among family, pre hearing aids, I had difficulty comprehending in a group setting. Background music or fan noise made it much worse. But it was stressful to have me repeatedly say “What?” when the reply was, “I wasn’t talking to you.” So, to grease the wheels, I stopped listening. It made family relations better if everyone assumed I heard zero unless they specifically attracted my attention first. Bad decision. Bad choice. I realize now that not listening is a far worse antisocial behavior than not hearing. I also realize that my habit of not listening has leaked beyond family in the home to my interactions with other people in several situations.

But real life is complex. In real life, it might be considered eavesdropping to listen to the people at the next table in a restaurant. Not eavesdropping is a skill. As a parent in charge of small children, it is your duty to listen to what the kids do and say even though you may be talking with another adult. That duty is a skill. Real life involves a spectrum of expectations. Hearing impaired people lose the skills needed to handle the spectrum.

How does one shed a bad habit? I quit smoking 30 years ago. That was the most difficult thing I ever did. Hopefully, shedding bad listening habits will be easier than that.

A Toastmasters club taught me a simple technique to stop using filler words like ah, um, and you know. I gave my wife a bell and I told her to ring it whenever she heard a filler word. The ding was most annoying. But in just a few hours, I kicked the filler word habit semi-permanently. I would like to do something similar with listening. I think two signals would be needed “listen, this is for you.” and “pay no attention this talk is not for you.” Ding and dong. Pragmatically, a loud DICK can be the ding and, OK is the signal for dong. I’ll try that and I’ll report the results.

Second, I located a Toastmasters club that emphasizes evaluations (critiques) of other people’s speech. If you are going to critique the speaker to his or her face, you must listen effectively. Criticism without full comprehension is a sure path to embarrassment. My brain needs to be re-trained to listen, comprehend, and analyze simultaneously. I probably had those skills as a teenager, but they have atrophied in the past 60 years. Aversion to embarrassment will be my motivation.

Dick Mills