When Cheryl Strayed relaunched her Dear Sugar column on Substack (go subscribe!), I thought about writing to her immediately. She had answered one of my questions previously—about 10 years ago—and her compassionate advice-giving, wisdom, and keen storytelling eye make her a standalone champion in the empathy arena.
So I started writing out my question to Strayed in my journal, hoping to later transcribe it and send it off, then wait to see if mine would be the lucky one to get plucked from the pile of possibly hundreds of letters Strayed receives each month.
A bit defeated by the thought that it wouldn’t get plucked at all, then I thought, well, instead of burdening Sugar with my woes, why not write and answer the letter myself?
I write an advice column as well, and have been doing it in some iteration since 2007, starting at Centerstage Chicago, a now-defunct culture website, then for the queer-women-oriented website AfterEllen, and then for the Chicago Tribune, which I still write today.
I’d like to think that after 15+ years I give pretty good advice. And yet, as any rational person will tell you, people are notoriously bad at taking their own good advice. A wise person who easily dispenses sound counsel to a loved one will, if the circumstances were reversed, often act in opposition to that same sound counsel.
Because the heart is a beautiful asshole.
So I thought again and decided I might give myself better advice if I were channeling Sugar, as it were, picturing her compassionate voice in my ear as I wrote. This was, coincidentally, advice a therapist had given me during my darkest of dark times a few years ago when I was battling some of the worst traumas of my life.
What follows is my attempt to do that, addressing Sugar as Dear Splenda, a jokey and obviously poor substitute for the real thing, but nevertheless imbuing the advice, I hope, with some of the goodness and kindness and humanity that Sugar is known for and spackling it upon my own wounds.
In any case, this was an interesting exercise and I encourage you to try it the next time you’re faced with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, to channel the wisest, most compassionate person or people you can muster to help guide you in your struggles. Doing so may infuse your turmoils with a little more empathy and care, the kind that we are often easily able to bestow upon others but fail to direct back at ourselves.
Dear Splenda,
I’m pretty deaf. You wouldn’t know it looking at me. My hearing aids are covered by my long hair, I pass as hearing at work (thanks to captioning services), and I’ve become very good at “faking” it—that is, pretending to understand what people are saying to me, or, failing that, then at least getting by without too many alarming social faux pas.
I fake it for a lot of reasons. A short list includes: Necessity, cognitive fatigue (the exhaustion that comes from attempting to hear someone when you can’t, and to ask people to repeat themselves over and over again), defensiveness, shame, anxiety, and because this is how I’ve learned to “adapt” in a world that by and large won’t adapt for me.
But more so than these daily challenges, I am engaged to the most wonderful woman, and she has two children. One isn’t old enough to really start talking yet, but the other is 10 and I can’t understand him a great majority of the time. While he is not my child, I know that I am unintentionally avoiding him and ignoring his needs because of my hearing loss (and the fear and anxiety associated with it). That is not what I want. I would love to befriend and bond with my partner’s children, and at the very least be able to meet their basic needs when they ask for, for instance, cereal or a hug.
I want to be able to comfort them if they’re scared, give them words of encouragement when they’re down, and to help them find their place in the world.
All of these things depend on being able to understand what they’re saying.
When I think about trying to integrate myself into my new family without being able to hear them, I become bereft. (I’m crying just writing about it now.) Having dealt with hearing loss for about 15 years, I’m used to missing a great many things in life—gossip, jokes, whole group conversations at dinners, in bars, sweet nothings, dirty talk—and largely I can accept this limitation.
But some days I can’t.
Some days I become so sad when I think about all the ways I can’t connect with people I love because I can’t hear them. I want to love and accept my hearing loss fully but I haven’t thus far been able to.
I’ve tried many things in the spirit of acceptance—I’ve joined online hearing loss communities (and some in-person ones, pre-Covid); I’ve tried a multitude of technological devices and apps to help assist my hearing; I’ve tried writing about my hearing loss, and speaking about it, and reading countless books about it; I’ve taken ASL classes (though they largely don’t stick because none of my friends or family know ASL); I’ve been in therapy on and off for years, once with a Deaf therapist. These things all help a tiny bit, but not much more than that.
The other barrier to my self-acceptance, I think, is that scientific advances are getting closer and closer to making it possible to restore hearing in people with sensorineural loss (that is, when the inner ear or nerves get damaged). I’ve signed up for many hearing loss organizations’ email lists, research institutions, and clinical trials, and while nothing has come of it yet, I remain in constant HOPE that someday soon some of my hearing might be restored and I’ll be able to understand my loved ones without anxiety, shame, or feelings of brokenness.
I guess my core question is one many of us struggle with: How do I learn to accept myself? How do I convince myself I’m not broken? How do I believe it? I’m at a loss about what to do with all this loss.
Yours,
Lost
Dear Lost,
In Far from the Tree, Andrew Solomon recounts a story about an extraordinary baby that was born in Saini Sunpura, a rural farming village in Northern India, named Lali Singh. Lali had a rare condition called diprosopus, which gave her two noses, two mouths, two pairs of lips, and two pairs of eyes.
If she had been born to another culture or another country, Lali’s birth probably would not have been treated as a celebration. And yet, in her village in India, it was. She was revered as an incarnation of Durga, a Hindu goddess with three eyes and many limbs. The Associated Press reported that a hundred people a day visited Lali’s parents’ house, leaving money, offerings, and asking for blessings. The village chief built a temple in Lali’s honor and asked the government for funds to pay for it.
Perhaps even more remarkable is how Lali’s parents loved and accepted their daughter’s unusual condition immediately. Sushma, Lali’s mother, said, “My daughter is fine—like any other child.” Vinod, Lali’s father, also insisted that she was normal, and refused special medical treatment for her, ignoring the hospital’s advice to administer a CAT scan, which would have checked for abnormalities in Lali’s organs. Her father also didn’t pursue treatment for Lali’s cleft palate, which was interfering with her ability to feed, saying, “I don’t feel the need of that at this stage as my daughter is behaving like a normal child.”
Lali died exactly two months after she was born from complications that could have been prevented if they had been addressed earlier.
The love and acceptance Lali’s parents showed their daughter became a kind of tragedy when coupled with the insistence of Lali’s “normality.”
What does this all have to do with you, Lost? Love and acceptance are wonderful, vital forces of good in the world, the very wellsprings that enable us to thrive. Yet, when experienced blindly or taken at face value, these forces can also lead to our potential downfalls.
The first piece of advice I would like to impart to you is this: Accept that you don’t accept yourself.