The Texture of Sound
A few weeks ago, my right ear went strangely quiet.
Not dramatic-quiet. Not the Hollywood kind where the soundtrack drops and you hear your own heartbeat like a bass drum. This was smaller, sneakier. A dulling. A soft muting on one side of the room, like someone draped a towel over half the world.
At first I tried to treat it like nothing. I’ve learned that my body loves to toss out little mysteries. Maybe it was a shower thing. Maybe it was congestion. Maybe I slept wrong. Maybe it would vanish the way so many odd sensations do—here for a day, gone by dinner, replaced by something else entirely.
But, it didn’t vanish.
The imbalance started to show itself in ordinary moments. I’d turn my head toward a sound and feel the lag—like the room had slightly different physics on the right. I was in the kitchen and Christa was working in the recliner, and when she said something from across the room I’d catch only the ends of the sentence, the way you catch a conversation through a wall when you weren’t invited to it. The baby monitor on the counter suddenly sounded thinner too—like it was broadcasting from the next apartment over, even though it was right there, inches from my hand.
I don’t scare easily. That’s not bravado; it’s adaptation. When you’ve already watched parts of your body drift away from the version you assumed you’d keep, you learn to live with the floating question marks. You make room for them. You keep moving.
Still, this hit differently.
Because I rely on my ears the way some people rely on their eyes. Not in a poetic sense. In a literal, daily, practical sense. My hearing is how I orient. It’s how I catch small things before they become big things. It’s how I do a decent impression of seamlessness in a world built for sight.
A quick clarification, because people always ask and I never know how to answer cleanly – I’m not totally blind. I’m legally blind, and my vision is hard to describe in a way that actually lands for someone who hasn’t lived inside it. I’m not going to try to render it here. I’ll just say that sight is unreliable enough now that hearing has become my main way of staying stitched into the room.
In the days between “this feels off” and “a doctor confirmed it’s not permanent,” my mind did what minds do when they sniff danger. It ran the worst-case scenario like a rehearsal.
If I lose more vision, okay—terrifying, yes, but my life is already arranged around that reality. If my speech slows further, I adapt. If my legs don’t cooperate, I learn new routes through the day.
But, hearing?
The thought of losing hearing—especially in one ear—felt like losing my last stable compass point. I imagined trying to track my kids’ voices in a room I can’t visually map. I imagined missing the quick, soft cues that make family life feel like music instead of logistics. I imagined the world getting even more distant, like I was sealed behind glass.
And, then my mind did an unhelpful thing—it reached for a symbol.
Helen Keller.
Not as a comparison in suffering. Not as a tragedy mascot. She was a person with a fierce mind and an immense life, and the cultural cliché around her has never been fair to the reality.
But, the fear that rose in me wasn’t about her. It was about me.
Losing speech, partial numbness, legal blindness, and then deafness in one ear? I pictured myself becoming de facto locked in—still present, still loving, still inside my own life, but separated from it by a thicker and thicker wall. Not because it would be impossible to live, but because I could feel how much of my independence, and my ease, and my ability to help my family depends on this one remaining channel being clear.
That fear surprised me by how sharp it was.
The ending, thankfully, was boring. The doctor looked in my ear, said a handful of unromantic words—drainage, wax, blockage—and the world clicked back into balance. No new diagnosis. No fresh collapse. Just the loud return of stereo.
But, the scare did something anyway.
It reminded me how much I value my hearing—not just as a utility, but as a way of being in the world now. And it also reminded me of something else I’ve been living with for a while, something I’ve hinted at in a few Open Doors posts without naming directly.
The simplest version is this.
My hearing isn’t just better than it used to be. It feels different.
Sometimes it feels… cross-wired.
A Mild Kind of Synesthesia
Synesthesia is one of those words that sounds like a metaphor until you realize it’s a real phenomenon. In its clearer forms, it’s when one sense automatically triggers another—sounds that produce colors, letters that have textures, numbers that come with personalities. The brain doesn’t keep its lanes as cleanly as we like to believe.
Some people live with synesthesia their whole lives. For others, the edges blur later—after trauma, after injury, after loss, after the brain has to reroute traffic.
I’m not claiming an extreme version. I’m not walking around seeing neon ribbons whenever a car door slams. I don’t hear a chord progression and suddenly taste blueberries.
But, since my vision has worsened, my auditory world has become more detailed, more spatial, and—here’s the strange part—more tactile.
Not tactile in the sense that I’m literally touching sound.
Tactile in the sense that sound arrives with extra properties attached, like my brain is building a richer object out of it than it used to.
A metal spoon against a ceramic mug has a cold glint to it. Clothes tumbling in the dryer feel rounded and woolen, even when I’m not touching them. Some voices carry weight, almost like a shape I could lift or set down somewhere.
And, sometimes a sound doesn’t just reach my ears—it shows up with texture. The clatter in the kitchen feels crunchy and jagged, while the dryer in the next room sounds smooth and rounded, like a hand sliding over polished wood.
I don’t mean I always notice this. Most of life is too busy for constant wonder. But when I slow down—and my body, honestly, forces me to slow down more than I used to—these details are there, waiting like a second layer beneath the obvious one.
If synesthesia is the fully lit version, maybe what I have is more like twilight.
A mild acquired auditory synesthesia, if that phrase isn’t too clunky.
Or, if I want to keep it simple, my hearing started doing more work, and my brain started making more out of it.
The Brain as a Practical Poet
There’s a scientific story here, and it’s not mystical. The brain is plastic. It rearranges itself. It steals resources from places that have gone quiet and reassigns them to places that have become essential.
When vision becomes less reliable, the brain leans harder on what’s left. It gets greedier with sound. It gets more precise. It learns the difference between “that’s a voice behind me” and “that’s a voice behind me and slightly to the left.” It learns the signature of a room: how it holds echoes, how it swallows them, how it breathes.
This is where I sometimes think back to what I was circling in “Consciousness Without Sensation.” That essay was partly a philosophical itch: if you stripped sensation away, would there still be a center? Would there still be “experience,” even in the absence of input?
It was a real question, but it lived safely in the abstract. It was a question you can ask while still assuming your senses will show up for you tomorrow.
What the ear scare did was drag that question closer to the body. It whispered something like.
You’re not writing about consciousness in a vacuum. You’re writing about consciousness inside a nervous system that can change.
And, in my case, that change hasn’t been only loss. There has been loss, yes. But there has also been reorganization. Compensation. Unexpected gains.
My hearing has become part of how I build a world.
I roll into a room and I can often feel its shape by the way sound behaves in it. I can tell when a door is cracked by the way the house “sounds” different, the way outside air leaks into the audio space like a thin ribbon. I know where my kids are not because I can see them, but because their voices land at particular angles, with particular distances.
Sound isn’t just sound anymore. It’s orientation. It’s geography.
Sometimes it’s almost like echolocation, but I hesitate to use that word because it makes it sound like a superpower. It’s not. It’s attention plus necessity.
The world doesn’t give you points for adapting. You just do it because you want to keep living your life.
Cool Grass, Ordinary Miracles
In “Cool Grass,” I wrote about a moment that was almost aggressively simple—shade, ground beneath me, the small chorus of a day outside. I wasn’t trying to be profound. I was trying to pay attention without turning it into a sermon.
But, that’s the thing: paying attention is already a kind of devotion, even if you don’t mean it to be.
When I sit still now—when I’m on the patio , or in the living room while the house does its usual evening noises—I can feel how much sound is doing. The refrigerator hum. The HVAC. The far-off traffic. A neighbor’s dog. The tiny scuff of a sock on the floor. The particular way my wife sets a mug down when she’s thinking hard versus when she’s relaxed.
This is not me romanticizing disability. I’m not trying to frame loss as a hidden gift in a neat little bow. I would prefer the old deal (well, I think. This hearing upgrade is great, so maybe I’d want both)—the deal where my sight stayed intact, and my body didn’t demand constant negotiation.
This is the deal I got.
Within this deal, my hearing has become something I genuinely treasure.
Not because it’s quirky.
Because it’s intimate.
It’s how I stay in the room with my family, even when my eyes can’t do the job.
The Fear Was Real, and That Matters
When I worried about being “locked in,” I wasn’t imagining a dramatic sci-fi fate. I was imagining a very ordinary loneliness—missing more of the quick human world that happens between words.
I don’t want to exaggerate the risk. People live full lives with profound hearing loss. People learn sign language. People use technology. People build communities and communication methods that don’t rely on the channels I’m used to.
I know that.
Still, I was scared.
It’s worth saying plainly because sometimes we feel pressure to be inspirational even while we’re trembling. Sometimes we speak in brave summaries because we don’t want to admit how fragile we feel inside.
For a couple days, I felt fragile.
I felt protective of my family and anxious about my capacity to show up for them. I felt the old, stubborn, stupid desire to remain useful in the exact ways I’m used to being useful.
I felt something else too, underneath the fear.
How much I love the everyday sounds of my life.
The chaos of little feet. The lopsided, half-sung Disney songs. The way my daughter calls for me with a tone that means she wants comfort, not answers. The quiet of the house after bedtime, when the day’s noise finally settles and you can hear yourself think again.
Flicking the Switch
Gratitude is one of those words that can curdle if you leave it out too long. It becomes a performance. A meme. A command. You should be grateful, it says, as if gratitude were a moral duty instead of a living response.
I’ve never liked that version.
The gratitude I’m talking about here isn’t a slogan. It’s not me pretending I don’t get angry or exhausted or scared. It’s not me trying to turn a medical scare into an uplifting lesson.
It’s closer to this.
When you rely on your hearing the way I do, there’s a temptation to treat it like infrastructure—something that just has to keep running quietly in the background. You don’t wake up every morning amazed that the power still works; you just flick the switch. Only in the blackout do you realize how complex and fragile the whole system is.
Those days of diminished hearing were a small blackout. They forced me to imagine, concretely, what it would mean to lose another axis of contact with the world. And then, when the balance returned, everyday sound felt less like background noise and more like something I’d been borrowing without noticing the terms.
It’s not that I now walk around in a constant reverent trance, bowing to the dishwasher and writing hymns to the refrigerator hum. I still get annoyed by leaf blowers. I still turn down the TV. I still tell the kids to please—seriously, please—stop shrieking and use indoor voices.
The difference is that under the annoyance, there’s an awareness of how much I would miss even the sounds that grate.
Listening as a Way of Being
I still return to the question from “Consciousness Without Sensation” now and then. What remains when the senses dim? Is there still a center? A quiet “what-it’s-like” that doesn’t depend on input?
Maybe.
But, I’m not in that room. Not yet.
I’m in this one—dim in places, unstable in places, but full of echoes and textures and the living noise of people I love. In this room, listening has become more than a sense. It’s a stance.
It’s how I parent—tracking the distance and urgency of a cry, recognizing the different cadences of “Dad!” that mean “come see this drawing” versus “my sister just stole my toy.” It’s how I move through my day—following the rise and fall of traffic, the bark of a dog I’ve never seen but feel like I know. It’s how I write too—attuned to rhythm, to breath, to the way a sentence presses against the next.
If what I have is a mild kind of acquired auditory synesthesia, then it isn’t a party trick. It’s a practical poetry the brain writes when it has to. A way of turning sound into more than sound, because more is required now.
For now, I still get to live in stereo. I still get to feel the world arrange itself through my ears—footsteps, laughter, wind chimes, traffic, podcasts, the tiny crackle of a candle.
I don’t know how long that will last. None of us do, really, even if we’ve never had to think about our hearing for a single second.
What I do know is this.
The next time my ear feels off, I’ll call the doctor sooner. I’ll let myself feel the fear without pretending it’s nothing. And when the balance returns—as I hope it continues to—I’ll try, for a moment, to notice the sheer improbability of it all.
Two ears.
A damaged visual system.
A nervous system that’s still willing to improvise.
A mind in the dark, listening hard
