I was four years old when someone noticed that I was partially deaf. One of my primary school teachers raised her concerns with my parents, suggesting that perhaps it wasn’t that I refused to listen, but rather that I couldn’t. A few days later it was revealed that I was fully deaf in my right ear, and partially deaf in my other, and that it had been that way since I was born.
Miraculously, this didn’t impact my life as I grew up at all. I developed completely normal speech; I could listen to everything fairly normally. There were small things that I’d notice, pitches and tones that friends could hear that I couldn’t, I had a difficulty placing which direction sounds would come from and I remember being utterly bemused when I realised that some songs played different parts of a track through different headphones.
I also had to be weary of any potential threats to the remaining hearing I had. Any common cold, flu, or even the Coronavirus could have devastating effects on my hearing, as could an ear infection. Sometimes I’d suffer from labyrinthitis or fits of dizziness, but usually these things passed, or a few antibiotics later I’d be back to normal.
I say this because I’ve never really considered myself deaf, or even remotely disabled for that matter. In fact, I’d wager that had I not told the people I know that I was partially deaf that they’d never know. The point being that even though I was partially deaf that I’d never entertained the idea that one day my world could be silent. It had never crossed my mind.
This brings me to the recent Oscar-nominated film Sound Of Metal, where Riz Ahmed plays Ruben, a heavy metal drummer about to embark on a tour with his band’s lead-singer and girlfriend, Olivia Cooke’s Lou, until he experiences sudden hearing loss and has his entire world upended. I remember feeling distinctly taken aback at the accuracy of the film’s portrayal of Ruben’s hearing loss and the vividness on which they capture the confusion and horror in his realisation.
In a clever call-back to a previously joy-filled breakfast making scene, we see Ruben wake up and begin his normal run-of-the-mill morning routine, except, through superb sound design, we realise that he is struggling to hear all of the things that he had previously taken for granted. It’s particularly striking that he doesn’t even initially realise fully what is happening to him.
This brought me back to four years ago. I was twenty-six at the time and had just recovered from a nasty chest-infection for which I was advised to take two weeks off of work and naively didn’t. The infection itself had passed and left me with a false sense of security, but one day shortly afterwards I got out of bed, walked into my living room to greet my girlfriend and saw her lips moving as she greeted me back, but didn’t register any words.
I could hear but I had absolutely no comprehension. Everything just sounded like a blur, like a different language or baby-speak. Like Ruben in Sound Of Metal it took me a while to fully realise what I had lost. At the time I tried to push it to the back of my mind and pretend it wasn’t happening. Thankfully, when I woke up the next morning my hearing had returned somewhat back to normal.
This sparked a few months of going to the doctors and having hearing tests where I eventually discovered that the hearing in my one good ear had been further damaged as a result of the recent infection, that I should expect similar episodes of almost total, if not complete, deafness and that I would have to be extremely careful with my ear going forward. I should avoid getting the inside of my good ear wet, I should avoid excessively loud noises and I should no longer use headphones. This meant no swimming, no gigs or music festivals, and no binge-watching films on my laptops. It obliterated the things that I enjoyed.
It’s no wonder then that I had found in Ruben a character that I could fully relate to in a way that, perhaps, I hadn’t found in any other fictional character before. Not just because he was someone in similar circumstances, but through the events in the film and the sound-design, I was able to feel how I felt in that moment, and experience these events in the same way I did through him.
When Ruben refuses to stop playing in the band only to worsen his situation, I immediately remembered the fact that even now I sometimes defiantly and foolishly still listen to albums loudly through headphones. When Ruben tries to bluff his way through the hearing test, I remembered holding the button I’m supposed to press when I hear the tone and trying to second guess when it would.
When I was younger, I was offered a trial of Cochlear Implants. I was warned that, despite the intensive procedure where they drill mounts into your skill for the hearing aids to sit on, they might not work, whereas Ruben spends the majority of the film trying to save money to pay for them.
The fact that Ruben was a character who was struggling to afford healthcare that I had been offered for free under the NHS in England, but had turned down was certainly a stark reminder of how much easier my hearing loss journey had been; simply because of where I happened to have been born. This made me think about the number of children in America who might be like me, but couldn’t afford the grommets I’d had fitted, the numerous hearing tests and the hearing aids that I’d eventually be given shortly after my episode from four years ago.
But whilst our circumstances were different, the inward struggle was the same. I remember feeling worried when I was told I’d need hearing aids. To put it simply, I didn’t want them. I didn’t want to feel like I needed help with something as basic as hearing at the age I was. But I slowly came round to the idea, as I started thinking about being able to hear things like I used to, and eventually I was looking forward to them. They were going to make everything better.
But, just like Ruben in his big cochlear implant unveiling, I was underwhelmed by the effect the hearing aids had. Sure, the sound was louder, perhaps clearer, but it had a distracting metallic quality to it. It was like reality and life had been passed through an encoder, translated by a robot or had been interfered with by some sort of signal. It’s a distortion of how I remember things sounding. It’s so jarring that to this day I struggle with not wearing my hearing aids all of the time. So in that moment, I fully empathized with Ruben’s disappointment — even if I didn’t quite have the emotional sucker punch of pinning all of my hopes to it after struggling for all that time to be able to afford them.
But Ruben’s struggle with his situation rang true to me on a more general level, leaving me extremely conflicted about a lot of things. Since that deterioration four years ago I have had severe tinnitus in my only ear. Every day I wake up to the sound of rushing, roaring, or something similar and every night I find myself longing for silence, a sound I don’t really remember. There were moments during Sound Of Metal that I madly found myself almost envious of Ruben’s eventual total deafness.
Then again, I think about the fact that every time I go to sleep I might wake up not being able to hear my wife again. I think about how four years ago, I was a year away from marrying the woman of my dreams and how I thought that I might not be able to hear her say ‘I do.’ I think about how there’s a chance that I could lose my hearing before I have children, that I might never hear my baby cry for the first time, or my toddler’s laughter. These kinds of thoughts keep me up at night often more so than the tinnitus does, and I find it incredibly hard to reckon with this possible and realistic future for me.
It almost feels like every single sound I hear is a grain of sound falling into the bottom of an hourglass and I only have a finite number of grains left. It’s almost like my possible impending deafness is a pre-emptive death, a minor grappling with my mortality before I take on actual mortality. It sounds ridiculous, but that’s how much it weighs on me. In many ways I wish that my hearing loss had been identical to Ruben’s, simply and irreversibly thrust upon me, but in the end I realise that, unlike Ruben, I am extremely lucky as I am still able to hear, I’m still able to discover new music to obsess over, I’m still able to enjoy and listen to epic sprawling soundtracks on films, even if I do need the subtitles to fully grasp the dialogue more often than not and I am still able to live a fairly normal life.
Ultimately, it’s this feeling that I find myself sharing with Ahmed’s Ruben the most. The difficulty in finding peace in something that feels so violently life-changing and so unfairly inevitable to an extent. In following Ruben’s journey into acceptance of his new fate, particularly with his interactions with the deaf community he finds himself in and that poignant final shot of him completely embracing the beauty in the silence around him, I did feel some sort of relief and hope for the future. If he can come to terms with his deafness now, then surely I can find a way to accept mine if it ever comes.
