Scott reminded me of a wonderful post he wrote a few years ago on the peculiar mentality of being so functional that you can often — but not always — ignore your disability:

But I’m reminded, nonetheless, that despite how I sometimes grow furious while trying to accomplish a simple task like driving a screw or installing a windshield wiper, what stuns me from time to time is not that. It’s not the physical inability.

It’s the way the imagination itself becomes disabled.

When I was in my teens, my step-mother struggled with carpal-tunnel syndrome (she’s an RN), and so went through a period where her dominant hand was immobilized for several weeks after surgery. While eating dinner one evening at a Red Lobster in Memphis, she was forced to eat with her left hand. She looked at me and said “Wow, this is weird. This is so strange.”

I just looked at her and said “I honestly cannot even begin to imagine that. Seriously.”

This is what gets me. The rest is all simply frustrating.

What often gets me is the fact that I simply don’t know that certain things make sounds, and people have had to tell me. Snow falling, for instance. Or water boiling. Or hummingbird wings. As a writer who relies on description, this bothers me for the same reason Scott wrote his piece: it impacts my imagination. I wrote an essay a few years back on aspects of this, and it was published in a departmental collection. I’ll see if I can’t dig it up and post it here.

(I have a feeling that this is going to be Deafness Contemplation weekend here at Thinkery. There are several things I’ve been meaning to write on the topic for a long time. The trouble is that this makes me feel as if I’m gazing deeply into my own ... not navel, but ear canal, perhaps.)