'Reading is like a mirror before us.'
Sarah Fielding 1710-1768
A book need not be about deafness to make us weigh therole of hearing loss in our lives. All of us, deaf or not, have had the experience of reading something and realizing that it is speaking to us in a very personal way. Perhaps, as Fielding suggests in the quote above, certain books may even hold a mirror up to us, allowing us to see ourselves in new ways. Just so was my recent experience with the book Stuttering: A Life Bound Up in Words by Martin Jezer. (Basic Books, 1997, $23.00)
Mr Jezer, a life-long stutterer of, by his own admission, epic proportions, describes in his book his attempts to deal with his expressive defect. A struggle, which as I read on, I came to understand was, to an astonishing degree, almost identical to my own struggle with hearing loss. By the time I was done reading, it was plain to me that communication deficits, whether induced by poor hearing, as in my case, or by poor speech, as with Mr Jezer, are remarkably similar in the psycho/social trauma they are capable of producing.
The author, for example, talks at length of avoiding using the phone, of trying to fade into corners at parties in hopes that no one will approach him for conversation, of having to rely "on the kindness of strangers" in such situations as job interviews, of fear of rejection by society as a whole, and of that old bugaboo that we with hearing loss are all too familiar with denial. I have often been asked by hearing friends how one can possibly deny something that is an obvious physical fact, and reading MrJezer's account of how he cut dead a budding friendship because his friend had acknowledged that his (Mr Jezer's) speech was a problem caused me to come close to tears. I don't know how we do it, but do it we do.
Most fascinating of all, Mr Jezer beautifully, and painfully, details his life-long search for a method that will allow him to speak with fluidity- as well as his growing quandary, in the midst of that search to determine where his energy should go. Should he, for example concentrate on continuing to look for a method that will allow him some fluidity in his speech-of which there are many; many of which work, but in Mr Jezer's case only with great concentration and effort, pretty much ruling out any enjoyment of any conversation that may result from their use. Or should he, after years of futile effort, channel his energies into shedding the psychological burden of linking his identity with t he word stutterer, and work instead at being at home in his own skin- Martin Jezer, a man who happens to stutter?
Sound familiar? Change the word stuttering to hearing and we have a pretty good picture of the problems that life presents to those of us with serious hearing loss. Mr Jezer, despite having an expressive disability, the opposite of our receptive problem, was as torn as we often are over those same questions.
It is illuminating to recall when we are tempted to retreat into our disability, feeling ourselves unique in our misery, that others under quite different circumstances, are fellow travellers. I, for example, have, at times, been sure that I have at last gotten everything "under control" and have reached a place of peace in living with my disability. Then, just like Mr Jezer, who actually volunteered for a study on medication for stuttering that made him sick as a dog, I am off on the trail of a new scent; the new Clarion CI perhaps? Signing? And by the way- how is the research coming on that new voice recognition software?
None of this is "wrong" of course- as Mr Jezer, who has come to no firm conclusion regarding a balance in his own life, eloquently points out. But the danger is that in our concentration on the hope for a future "cure," we will forget to live in the present, and live our lives AS a disability, rather than WITH a disability.Stuttering; A Life Bound Up in Words is a book that left me with much to ponder, and, through the good offices of a surprising fellow traveller, produced a reflection in a literary mirror of no small proportion.