Gumball Surprise!

Have you ever felt like you lived two separate lives? Where unexpectedly, at the flip of a switch, the life that was so familiar to you two seconds ago, suddenly echoes down a tunnel to the pits of your past? Like the childhood euphoric feeling you’d get when magic was created by sticking a quarter into the gumball machine, and with just one twist of the handle, you’d hear that gumball drop while holding high expectations in the delight and anticipation that at end of the long tunnel you’d receive the gumball flavor you were hoping for. Those moments of excitement that you feel as you hear the gumball rattle down that tunnel, hearing each twist and turn along the way, while your eyes light up in curiosity to find out if the results will live up to your expectations. The thrill and rush you get as you hear that gumball quickly approach the bottom, where you’ll soon lift, with your tiny little hands, the door that will reveal your gumball surprise. Except, all the sudden you hear the gumball get jammed just moments before it reaches the bottom door. Your parent thinks to jolt it loose, but no matter how much they push and shove and tilt that machine, there’s no prying it loose. Now the only thing you got out of the event is crushed expectations, and a lost quarter. Sure, there will be other opportunities and more gumballs machines, but as a child… in that moment…. you feel as though the opportunity was snatched from you.

That jammed gumball will be one of the first of many hard-learned lessons where you must be willing to walk away disappointed. Crying won’t fix the problem, and eventually we’ll run out of quarters. Just like life. We will give it all we have, setting our expectations so high, just to be left empty handed after all our efforts. But moments are not about lost quarters, or jammed gumballs… it goes much deeper as being a missed opportunity to fulfill your moment with delight.

Imagine being twelve years old, sitting in an empty, stale, white doctor’s office room with your mom at your side, anxiously awaiting to find out the results as to why your ears feel so clogged after a bad cold. You figured it’s just a bad case of the flu bug and that you’ll be out on your merry way to recover after a prescribed antibiotic or medication of some type that will help unclog your ears. It’s just like any normal check-up during flu season, and it won’t be long until you can bounce back to your normal energetic self: the aspiring athlete and honor roll student who strives for perfection every day. After all, practice makes perfect, so you practice a lot. This moment, sitting in the doctor’s office, is just a bump in the road but you know you’ll soon recover to your ol’ self. No big deal. You watch the door handle twist, as the doctor opens the door and sits down attentively to deliver the news you were anticipating: “You’re going deaf, and there’s nothing we can do about it”.

Gumball… jammed.

In my own disbelief, I turn to my mother for reassurance that certainly the test results were wrong, or that what the doctor is saying is one huge misunderstanding. I watch as my mom continues to probe the doctor for more information and answers, but by then, I was already zoned out in my own galaxy far far away so that I could escape my reality that was revealed just two seconds ago. Shortly after the doctor exits the room, I watch as gentle tears rolled down my mother’s cheek. She had begun grieving for me the losses I would soon endure as my hearing would become progressively worse, as I still sat in disbelief. It was only in her tears that I felt something was very wrong and that my life would no longer be what I had aspired for it to be, just two seconds ago. Two seconds and my life changed forever.

The first words I could nervously put together to ask my mother were, “Mom, do you think anyone will ever love me now?”. For the first time in my twelve years of life, I felt isolated and completely alone and there was nothing I could do to fix it or make it better. No amount of practicing or studying could magically reconnect the auditory nerves that were slowly disconnecting from within my inner ear. I felt as though my body is now working against me, to humiliate me and snatch away my confidence and ideal perfect life,… and so the internal battle began. I no longer recognized myself as the aspiring basketball star or honor roll student full of potential and hope; I only saw myself now as going deaf and becoming disabled, dependent. In two seconds, I felt like I’d become an impeding burden on the lives of my loved ones and would soon lose all independence and chances to be worthy of love.

That drive home was gut-wrenching. Clicking my seatbelt in, I’d wonder to myself how long it would be until I could no longer hear that click any more. I sat quietly alongside my other siblings while our mother broke out the news to them. Luckily, they were blessed enough to still be gifted with their perfect hearing and living their normal life. I was not envious, because I’d never wish for my sisters to be in my position, so I sat there still mentally in a different galaxy, questioning why was it just me who got the bad genes? I felt like the odd-one-out in the family. I felt like I had to figure this new life out on my own, uncertain of what was next.

That long ride home was silent to me, not because my hearing was rapidly vanishing every second. No, I could hear the same as I did when I walked into that doctor’s office an hour prior. It was silent to me because despite all the conversations going on around me, the only thing I could hear was my inner conscious telling me that I no longer would fit into the social environment of the world around me. I had become a loner. I didn’t know anyone who was going deaf, it was just me, and I felt like I just wanted to hide for the rest of my life. All it took was one doctor visit for me to feel like my picture-perfect life was being snatched away from me and there was nothing I could do to stop it, nor nothing they could do to fix it. The rest of the car ride home felt as though my gumball was slowly disintegrating into a fine sand, like the sand in a timer trickling down a funnel, ticking down to the last second until I would no longer be able to hear those quarters clinking around in my pocket.

I imagine adolescence is a trying time for many and that my story just so happened to fall down a different tunnel when the possibilities were many, but that’s what I got. I never fully understand now why, as a society, we put so much pressure on one another growing up, or get so caught on this idea of perfection and living a perfect life.

I’d spend the next ten years or so of my life internally fighting to hide my going deafness and struggling to accept that I was, in fact, losing my hearing. Every sound in the house became an experiment to me that I would ask for confirmation if it made a noise and describing what it sounded like to me. I’d become defiant in wearing my hearing aids because the last thing in the world I’d ever want is to be identified as imperfect, and those hearing aids would shortly after be stolen in the high school gym locker because I was too embarrassed to wear them with my hair up to be revealed to the world, so I’d tuck them in my gym bag instead. Just the fact that a fellow student would take them from me is the very reason why I didn’t want to wear my hearing aids in the first place: kids can be cruel and society isn’t a safe place.

I’d soon retreat from the activities that I loved, such as playing basketball because I could no longer hear the referee blow the whistle, or hanging out in social situations where a lot of noise was involved because I’d struggle to hear past it all. You learn quickly that sometimes the best way to get by socially is to just smile and nod, or respond with the simple “yes” or “no”, or “cool” based off the facial expressions the individual was giving you and the tone in their voice; because you don’t want to have to ask “what?” five thousand and fifty-one times, only to still not fully understand what in the H-E-double-hockey-stick they just said to you.

These tactics would only work short term in my journey, until eventually I would just decide to become that gumball that decides to get jammed right before that opened door. I grew this mindset of myself because I felt that it’s best to seclude myself socially and have others be disappointed in a jammed gumball, than to risk the chance of having someone open the door only to see their look of disappointment across their face because I wasn’t what they were hoping for. Either way, they’re going to be disappointed, so I might as well save myself the embarrassment and not show up at all. The more individuals and loved ones tried to unjam me by pushing and shoving me to get out and to attend social situations, the more I had gotten better at making excuses as to why I would be too busy that day.

The paranoia that would sit on my shoulder, reminding me to check over my shoulder when out in public just to be sure that no one is calling my name or trying to speak to me and I wouldn’t respond because I didn’t hear them. Then they’d know of my hearing loss, and I just wasn’t ready to approach the awkward situations where I’d have to introduce myself, followed by, “sorry, I’m hard of hearing, could you please repeat yourself?”. My parents might as well had named me deaf, because then it might have made my introduction a little more simple: “Hi, I’m deaf”.

It’s been over two decades now since I guess you could say my ‘second life’ began. It’s wild to think that I’ve been near-deaf for 2/3rds my life, which is longer than I have been of hearing. I even start to forget what being fully hearing was like. I’ll be in social settings where individuals can hear the conversations going on in the booths next to them; or watch as they pick up a phone without hesitation; or hold a conversation in the other room of the house while doing fifty different things in talking to someone in the kitchen, who is also doing fifty different things; or have someone recite lyrics to a new song because they can actually hear lyrics in the song just by listening without having to google search them. It baffles me, to remember what hearing must have been like. I forget what those days were like, even though I was blessed at one point to have them.

My progression of hearing loss has been gradual. What was originally 10% loss of hearing, 90% still hearing; has now mirror imaged to 90% loss of hearing, and only 10% of my hearing remains. I get by with lip reading, which can be extremely exhausting in trying to keep up. Have you ever watched someone try to mouth words to you through a window? Now imagine there’s no window and they are standing only 2 feet in front of you but all it sounds like is when you ‘almost’ get a signal on the radio. Even those of hearing go through something called listener’s fatigue. In addition to lip reading, I now also heavily rely on visual cues, tone of voice, gestures, and all things non-verbal to help me understand what is going on around me. But even this can be about as successful as a game of charades. “You’re talking about your dog? no wait…. your cat?.... your kid?.... Batman?”.

I really start to notice my hearing loss when I listen to 90’s pop music and I can no longer hear the cymbals of the drum, or the squeaky noise an electric guitar makes. I’ll sometimes think it’s just my headphones that are just broken so I’ll go buy a new pair, only to plug in the new set remember, “oh yeah, I guess it’s just my ears that are broken”. Even listening to old songs can feel like part of my past life, because they sound different now, not how I remembered them. Mentally, I can still remember exactly what things sound like, like the memory in my brain can fill the gaps in my hearing. And while being once hearing is a complete blessing on one end of the spectrum (I did not require speech therapy while growing up); it can also be a complete curse. Because I was fully hearing growing up, I was not fully submerged in deaf culture and I am still not involved in deaf culture, even though I ache to be. My normal is around hearing folks. There’s also the curse in that I’m constantly in a transitioning phase of being too deaf to be part of the hearing world, but too hearing to be part of the deaf world. This only further adds to my confusion in trying to understand exactly where I fit in.

On top of it all, because I don’t “sound” deaf, many acquaintances, employers, family, and loved ones tend to forget that I even have a hearing loss because of how hard I work to be seen as “normal”. Remember, the last thing I wanted was to feel like I had become an impeding burden to my loved ones, and even to society. At the same time, I do wish that society would not pressure those with disabilities to try to achieve this idea of meeting the expectations of appearing “normal” despite our disability. We will never live up to the standard of ‘normal’ and already struggle enough with our own self-doubts that we strive endlessly to overcome. Just like how sometimes the gumball is malformed, but it doesn’t mean that it still can’t be chewed and maintain the same flavor. And if you’ve ever had lack of self-confidence or self-esteem in filling out a job application, at least it doesn’t have to be followed by having a pit in your stomach because you’re afraid of a request for a phone interview where you’ll then have to respond with the awkward introduction of: “Hi, I’m deaf”.

And while I still socially struggle with being hard-of-hearing every day, I’m forever grateful for how much progress has come a long way. Medically, there is still really nothing that can be done for me unless I want to take the risk of destroying my inner ear in hopes that a cochlear implant might help, but even then there is still no guarantee. And quite frankly, I’m not ready to put my quarter into that gumball machine, only to turn the handle in having high expectations just to find out that not even brain surgery fixed the problem, and now there’s a literal hole in my head, and wallet. I’ll continue to wait on God and see what He has set before me while slowly learning to accept my ever changing normal, and to become comfortable with where I’m at right now. Maybe this is who God intended me to be and I just need to fully accept that?

Society has also come a long way in the accessibility aspect, where it is empowering for individuals such as myself to see the deaf community receive recognition and accommodation through technological means, and social acceptance and adaption. Whether it be businesses recognizing that we still have abilities, or our culture’s appearance in commercials and shows, or government regulations that help us persist in society; it’s great to see social progression so that we don’t have to feel like we are facing our disabled progression alone. Back in the day it seemed that the disabled would be handed a social security check monthly just to feel like we are expected to disappear from interacting within society if we can’t keep up in the world. While some individuals may be content and grateful in collecting social security checks, there are some of us who still want that opportunity to prove ourselves in that we are more than capable in our working society. Because after all, it’s not about being given a quarter, it’s about the opportunity to fulfill our life in meaningful ways, to feel that we serve a purpose, and to be able to experience those euphoric moments of delight. And while maybe we aren’t exactly the gumball that society hopes is waiting at the bottom of that door, maybe…. just maybe… we can alter the social perspective that our flavor is a lot like the rest, even if it’s not what was expected.

I still have a lot to learn in life and in my gradual decline; and while part of me still cries for my loses or holds fear in my future, there’s the other part of me that can’t help but to stand here baffled at all that I have learned and gained along the way that I would never had accomplished if I was too distracted by the noise and chaos around me. I’ve learned that it’s okay to not be perfect, and how freeing that feeling can be. I still meet people twice my age whom have not been able to let go of the idea to perfection, and I can see how much it’s deteriorating their own feeling of self-worth. I used to feel like that, until my loses reminded me I’ll never be able to achieve perfection. Tt’s the greatest gift in the world to be able to say, “I’m not perfect, but I’m okay with that”. I wish the rest of the world would learn to be just as okay with it, too. Trying to achieve perfection to me is often an even larger internal battle than having to accept my hearing loss. So if you are reading this and struggle with the idea of perfection, I hope you know that it is more than okay to be perfectly imperfect. Because even in our imperfections and broken pieces, we can always find somewhere that we will eventually fit in, together. Like mosaic tile pieces of a society, together we can complete the whole picture, and that’s a beautiful thing. Even gumballs know how to perfectly align together within a gumball machine, so that everybody has a place to fit in.

What has feeling like a misfit taught me? Well, let’s just say that now when I approach a gumball machine of opportunity in life, I’ll dig deep in my pocket for that last quarter, place my quarter in the machine and slowly turn the handle without expectations. And EVERY time, that gumball will jam. I know this because there’s no rattling down the tunnel, nor sounds of twists nor turns. And just before I think to walk away, I don’t push or shove or tilt the machine, because I know what it’s like to want to be a jammed gumball. My curiosity will get the best of me, so I’ll open that little door at the bottom anyways… you know, ‘just in case’. And to my delight, there will sit a perfect little gumball waiting for me, EVERY time! I’ve learned that just because I can no longer hear those rattles nor twists nor turns as my gumball makes its way down the tunnel; it doesn’t mean I have to lose the excitement and childlike feeling of euphoria in that there is something waiting for me behind that door. Now it just means that my loses can no longer trick me into thinking I must walk away in belief that it’s just one more opportunity that was snatched away. A perfect gumball? You know, perhaps the most important lesson in my loss is that it no longer matters what flavor gumball is waiting for me at the door because I’ve learned to be happy in the fact that I even got a gumball at all! Sounds perfect to me, because if you’ll remember, it was just two seconds ago that I thought for sure I was going to be walking away empty handed.