My Anechoic Chamber
I woke up at 8pm in my ward bed to a room full of faces and no sounds at all. The bright neon lights did not really bother me nor did the tight painful bandage holding my stitched head together but only the silence that felt too paradoxical with my room crammed with faces. While the many lips jumbled and the hand gestures conferred, my brain still not ready to let go.
I could hear nothing at all.
Four months ago and before I turned 25, I found out that I would lose most of my hearing by the time I am thirty. I don’t recall dealing with it as a loss, rather as betrayal — I secretly made a deal with life to stay fit until I am 35 then my body can decompose altogether if it wishes. Technically, I was ready for one hit but then my world came crashing down before I realise it. Soon , my scared brain developed this night-time habit of playing sounds in my sleep, often brewed with my squeaky tinnitus but I did not mind it. There has a life-shuffle playing all the sounds my brain had ever stored; let that be giggles, old embarrassing songs from MP3 era, teta’s voice or demonstrations’ chants. I somehow appreciated the sweet memories of it but not the interrupted sleep. After that came the panic attacks over the fact that I would miss what a certain song sounds like when I am thirty. For the laughs, I thought I wanted to hear Massari’s Real Love. I played it that night at 2am and loathed my teenage music taste. Are you fucking serious?
It seems that I had blacked out for quite some time before the nurse woke me up to take my medications, then I couldn’t go back to sleep. The night was long and the shuffle crawled its way into my brain. It was much louder that night because even the low frequency surrounding sounds were gone. And then it hit me that I have to be friends with silence for a few weeks.
For the longest time listening has been a hefty thing to carry out. I still feel the exhaustion and burnout I have experienced after every class, every lectures, listening exam, dinner and gathering. These feelings stay, not because they were unmanageable — I got used to hearing my way out around a crowd — but because in my attempts to maintain daily interactions, I had to experience them constantly and repeatedly that they became part of my being. Feeling exhausted, I would walk out of the room and zone out on my own somewhere to rest my jaded brain. All those times, silence and I were one hell of a team.
Then I woke up at 8pm in my ward bed to a room full of faces and no sounds at all except for the sounds of my inner sense, I was wide awake all night trying to perceive the silence, the decision I have made and the loneliness that came with them uninvited. I have been spent alone of quite some time before and I have survived lonely days, but that turned out to be metaphoric, often with a crowd, background noise and inaudible sounds. But that night at the hospital, I found myself different place with unfamiliar alone and lonely. I remember reading about Psychogenic’ deafness that became known after World War I; those exposed to loud noise at war did not become only only deaf, but also mute. And that’s how disorienting it feels — neither do I belong to the hearing world nor the deaf world. I am in someplace in the middle.
To make the best out of this place, I have been trying to make sense of the emotional turmoil that has gracefully fell upon my world. You see, I have been losing my hearing over a long period of time and that puts one in an emotional zone tainted with defeat, feeling isolated and broken. It was gradual and paired with the full knowledge the end holds. But this time, waking up to the abrupt harsh absence of sounds is not the kind of loss I have trained myself to deal with. It turns out I was familiar with losing what I own but not the sudden loss of it. Losing my hearing gave me the key to my echo chamber and one does not possess that with the outside world often too loud. For me, it was a switch away. But that day, I woke up in anechoic chamber, where the sound of silence prevailed inducing a feeling of fear. I began to melancholically let go of one of my body’s sensorial functions, albeit impaired, waking up to the absence of ambient sounds was the harshest reality I was forced into.
Soon I realised that true and utmost silence does not exist. When composer and philosopher John Cage explained his experience at the anechoic chamber, he mentioned that he still heard two sounds. Similarly, when the dialogues inside my head set to rest and the shuffle stops, my body starts to fearfully feel some sounds from within. It is a weird space to be in, so deafening and so dangerous to be trapped inside one’s self. To pass time that night, I started counting my heartbeats and muffled breaths as if they were internal soundscapes. Soon I began lightly tiptoeing around this abstract space between my inner sense and outer world totally oblivious to the fact that some people have gone crazy inside the anechoic chamber.
