This weekend someone noticed how my ears are open and everywhere. Often times to a fault. Ever since I was little, my little audio holes were receptive to sounds not meant for me. Private conversations across the room, phone calls at the gas pump next to our car, the second date gone awry at the restaurant where I was on my own date. Sometimes it feels like an invasion of privacy and others it feels like a small gift just for me. Like I’m getting told secrets from the whole world.
But the sounds are so loud. So much louder than the sounds that are meant for me.
Five or six years ago now after many a dinner where I was convinced I was experiencing hearing loss because I couldn’t hear or process the conversation that was happening at my own table, I went to have my hearing checked.
As they played me bits of sound and words through headphones with static and with loud claps and with soft tones and loud tones and with vibrations I could feel all the way to my brain flesh, they sat me down in a small room.
“Your hearing is fine. You can hear at a healthy level. But we want to know if you’ve ever heard of auditory processing disorder.”
Auditory processing disorder happens when the ear and the brain don’t keep up healthy communication. They’re kind of at odds with each other. The sound comes in, but the brain doesn’t take the right sound stimuli to the part of the brain that helps it cognitively download the data and make it into a thought or an action. Noisier places like airports, restaurants, parties, conferences… they all make it a little harder for the brain to parse out the necessary audio input to fully comprehend what is trying to be communicated towards us.
Learning about auditory processing disorder helped me understand so much of how I work. Why I’ve never been able to do my best homework or writing with music on. Why I often need to ask coworkers to send me questions in chat or email so that I can parse through the topic more wholly. And why I find so much comfort taking pen to page and making meaning from physical transcription of thought rather than through my mouth (lol yall know I also like to talk, but it helps me understand my affinity to the written word).
And this disorder has also given me, as I’ve already slightly touched on, a bit of a super power. I get to hear the most tender little human moments around me.
Like this weekend. I attended an abortion conference in DC. There were 1,300 abortion providers, advocates, funders, lawyers… the people who are making me believe in a world where we can all get the health care we need without shame or stigma. I kept note of the little blips I caught through my time there, and some of the highlights were:
“But one day I’ll get it. I’ll get the chopsticks, down!”
“See? This is where the ghost must live.”
“She never told her son. She didn’t want him to know she was positive.”
“I told her she’d either need to sleep with a woman or do drugs.”
“Drinking that much coffee exhausted me.”
“But at least I look like a hot grandma.”
“I had to tell my kid, ‘Look kid, you just stink.’”
Today, at the art museum by my house, I overheard an older woman speaking with one of the volunteer docents about how much the exhibit resonated with her. It reminded her of her mom’s distaste for The Establishment TM and the expectations that society has always had of women. To do the emotional labor. To make children and raise them. To also have a job. To be the caregivers. But to never have anything worth making noise about.
The artist is Niki de Saint Phalle and her art is a celebration of the ways that women joyfully disrupt expectation and hold power. An artist that captured gender, politic, and spirit so chaotically that it is close to the unexpectedness of life, she was once quoted in an interview saying "I think women could administer this world much better. If Black power and women power would get together, they would take over everything. That's the solution. A new world of joy."
There’s so much truth in those lines. In the ways the world would be different outside the confines of the white supremacy patriarchy. In the ways we can make decisions and solutions and resources that lift up and center Black folks and women and queer folks and that by way of that, we all rise. But in the way of the joy and the world is the fear. The fear and the ignorance. Of hearing but not really listening.
“A new world of joy.”
A world where you don’t have the police called on you to shoot rubber bullets at your face for thinking genocide is bad.
A world where wanting a genocide to be over isn’t heard as identity based violence.
A world where people can make art and sleep and eat and dream instead of hide and scream and starve and endlessly wake to sounds of war.
A world where little children, little six year old Hind, can call for help and get the help they need instead of it being a death wish.
A world where we remember “Disclose! Divest! We will not stop, we will not rest!” in a memory of sweet sweet resolution, of community power.
As I get older, as I lament with loved ones about my anxiety of aging, as I talk with loved ones who have little babies and I dream about having my own, as I watch my grey hairs turn from solo strands to groups of dancing shimmer shine, I no longer shirk away from moments where I might rock the boat. I am no longer driven by people pleasing or finding consensus or saying the kind and nice thing. Instead, I am motivated by the truths, big and small, that we carry around in our hearts and in our mouths that make us wholly human. The kind of truths that we share in hushed tones on friend dates not knowing the lady two tables over can hear every word.
We are connected. We are heard. We are watching young people build a new world. And we must, with steady hands and hearts, witness them and support them.
I want to see babies laughing, not without breath after a bomb. I want to see student’s heads a-thinkin’, not wrapped in bandages after police busted their heads on the sidewalk. I want to see the soft parts of the world. I want to hear the sweet loving whispers that come from a place of not fear, but freedom.
This week I ate ice cream in the rain, I was in the sky with lightning, I licked my cat’s fur, I popped-corn, and made lacto-fermented hot sauce. I stirred dates and rhubarb and cardamom into a compote and danced with a little baby and swam in my clothes. I pressed seeds into the dirt and hope, for the love of all things fertile-Missouri, they turn into fruits and vegetables and greens and don’t all get eaten by the burrowing mammal that lives in my garden. I day-dreamed about a hot sauce survey where a customer shares all the flavors they love and I ferment them and make them into their own personality’s sauce bottle. Would anyone want this saucy service?
It’s May now. Wow. In April I read The Prettiest Star, Fables and Spells, His Own Where, Educated, and Speak No Evil.
Last weekend I kissed abortion providers on the forehead and hugged them til we had to go and wore matching outfits, t-shirts reading “Abortion Providers for a Free Palestine.” We went to the dispensary and talked about Palestine with the young person behind the counter and bought a watermelon toned accessory.
Our world is changing so that we can all get free. Come on, let’s go.