In 2009 I had a life changing opportunity. If you read the post prior to this, you will know that I was working as a Finance Director in fashion retail, approaching burnout. In March that year, the group I was working for went into administration.1 Many brands disappeared overnight and many of my colleagues were immediately unemployed. I was one of the lucky ones, my brands were immediately resold by the administrators. The newly formed group had to take on all of the employees of the brands that they purchased, but then made some of them redundant. I was one of these employees, so I left with some money. I had already decided that this would be my last role of this kind. I felt very jaded about the industry, and a decade of long, stressful days with many working weekends was beginning to affect my health. Before my 30-day redundancy consultation period was up I had already enrolled on a full-time Sound and Audio Engineering Diploma. This was my chance to finally make a life change that I had been mulling over for some time. I loved every minute of it, and to this day it is still one of the favourite passages in my life. However it was also a period of personal loss, different to the loss I have experienced this year, but still very significant. The diploma was a very thorough programme, covering not just the technical side of sound engineering, but also the more philosophical aspects of sound, music and listening. I learned to think about how we experience music, for example, the difference between live and recorded listening experiences and the importance of critical listening. I began to appreciate that we can never truly know exactly what anyone else is hearing, any more than we can know what they are thinking or feeling. It is a deeply personal experience. Of course, biology, psychology and neuroscience can provide an understanding of human hearing response but there is so much that impacts the journey of a sound wave before it becomes a perceived sound in your brain. Each person’s ears have a unique shape and perform acoustic shadowing that provides additional information about where the sound is in relation to you, for example above or behind you.2 Delicate bones in the inner ear amplify the sound, tiny hair cells in the cochlear unpack frequency, nerves transmit this sound to the brain where it is interpreted.3 What we hear is influenced by where we are standing in the room, what we can see, how close we are to the sound source, reflected sound that bounces from surfaces, whether we recognise the sound4 and even how we are feeling in that moment. I understood the problem of ‘transparency’ of sound for the first time; how important it was to choose a reference track that I could take from desk to desk, or studio to studio, to try and unpack some of the differences caused by the room and equipment. A track that I had listened to hundreds of times, across as many different scenarios as possible, and could use to understand what I was listening to, and how it might sound when recorded and played somewhere else. I sat in a critical listening class where the discussion turned to that week’s listening homework, and an exquisitely placed triangle hit. I had listened to the track extensively, picked it apart, understood every aspect, but triangle? Really? Somehow I had missed the triangle. I went back to the track after class and I still couldn’t hear it. This was the start of many similar disquieting experiences. I began to recognise the heart stopping feeling I experienced each time I realised that I was missing something that everyone else could hear; and worse still, the fear that I was going to be found out. During this period I suffered a damaged ear drum. The hospital consultant was puzzled, I came in with physical damage to one ear drum, but did I know that I had failed the hearing tests with significant symmetrical loss across both ears? I started to piece everything together as I finished my diploma. I worked hard and did well, but I knew my passion to move into sound engineering was dead in the water. I continued to work as a sound engineering volunteer for community groups and venues, but the fear of getting found out became too overwhelming. It was usually something entirely trivial that tripped me up, rather than anything lacking in my ability to do my job; but once the seed of doubt was sown you had to move on. I was diagnosed officially in 2010 when I was 39. I have a high frequency loss of about 75% of the normal hearing threshold, for sounds above 5,000Hz. Humans perceive sounds from around 20-20,000Hz on a logarithmic scale. Some high frequency hearing loss is normal as we grow older, but this was far in advanced of the loss I should have had for my age. 5,000Hz is significant because this is the frequency where many of the sounds that characterise speech occur, for example consonants that allow us to distinguish between different words.5 I was in denial and avoided getting hearing aids for several years. I exhausted myself trying to hide my condition. Even when I did start to wear NHS hearing aids, I grew my hair to cover my ears so that I could hide them in auditions and rehearsals. An unhelpful side-effect is hyperacusis.6 What this means for me is that sudden loud noises, especially at high frequencies, are very distressing and can make me pass out. So when I was the lead singer in a covers band, and there was feedback from the PA at a live event, I could feel the panic rising, breaking out into a cold sweat, desperate for them to fix it before the shutters came down. I stopped singing live altogether for a time as a result. I play big band jazz and in concert bands, so I often have trumpets or trombones behind me. A piercing high note from a trumpet (they can never play them quietly!) has a similar effect, so I sometimes spend gigs with an ear defender in one ear and my hearing aid in the other to try and cope. I take paracetamol before every gig in case I get a noise induced migraine. Without my hearing aids (and even sometimes with them), I often rely on guessing what words might be from the context of a conversation, getting as close as possible to the person speaking and trying to optimise visibility of their lips. Subsequent discussion with friends and colleagues has revealed that this is often interpreted as a very intense focus on the person I am talking to, which can make them uncomfortable without quite realising why. I often get it wrong, which usually results in a supportive laugh from people that know me, but can sometimes be more uncomfortable. Everyday situations, such as sitting in a hospital reception room waiting for your name to be called, become highly stressful. My disability is largely hidden. My current hearing aids are much smaller and less noticeable than my NHS ones and I sometime forget to put them in. I take them out to travel on public transport so that I can listen to music on headphones, and occasionally forget to put them back in when I arrive at my destination. I take them out when I am working in a noisy environment to cut out background chatter. I then get caught out by people coming up behind me at my desk, speaking as they approach and expecting an immediate reaction. Instead I am startled when I realise there is someone behind me and I have no idea why they are there, or how long they have been behind me. Some people assume you are stupid, that English isn’t your first language (yes really), or that you are being wilfully difficult to make a point. Of course, it is none of those things. I don’t know exactly when the loss started, whether it was gradual or sudden, but I do know that my hearing wasn’t always as it is now. In 2015 I was working with the London Symphony Orchestra’s Education and Community Programme LSO Discovery7. I was invited to a performance as part of LSO On Track8. The programme included one of my favourite pieces of music, The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams. I don’t know when I first heard the piece, possibly it was when I was studying music as a teenager at school. Written originally for violin and piano in 1914, the fully scored version was first performed in 1920.9 The piece is based on a poem by George Meredith, written in 1881.10 He rises and begins to round, It is an optimistic piece, redolent of the beauty and stillness of the English countryside, seemingly at odds with the wartime context at the time of writing.9 Over the years I have absorbed it and know every note of the violin part as it represents the lark climbing into a clear blue sky. This particular performance was a few years after my official diagnosis of hearing loss, but I was still struggling to cope with my hearing aids. As the piece started, the comforting swell of the strings enveloped me. As the violin began to climb against the sustained chord, my heart began to swell with the beauty of it, as it always does, focussing intently on the lark’s journey, circling higher and higher. Then the sustained strings dropped away, leaving the violin alone. That’s when I first noticed a problem. I could hear the violin soaring in my head, but I couldn’t hear it in the concert hall. I sat in shock, faced with the undeniable evidence that I couldn’t hear something that I knew should be there. I had heard it before so many times, and could still hear it on most recordings with headphones, but in a live concert hall environment, the lark was lost to me. I sat with tears dropping gently down my face, my heart thumping, feeling slightly sick and staring straight to the front so that the people either side of me didn’t notice. The beauty of the music that I could hear only made my melancholy worse. I still can’t listen to the piece today without recollecting how distraught I was in that moment. In recent years I have ‘come out’ so to speak. I have cut my hair short again (always my preferred style) and become more open about my hearing with my musician and professional colleagues. So why have I chosen to write about this now, and here in this blog? This year I have had to come to terms with many losses. With the death of my husband, I felt that I had lost the one person who lived with me through the years of being diagnosed, and knew in depth about my struggle to cope with my hearing loss. He was the only person that knew I couldn’t hear him talking in the morning, bleary with sleep and with one ear smothered by a pillow. He knew that when I withdrew from a busy social gathering, it wasn’t because I was being rude, I was exhausted with the additional concentration required to listen properly and needed some time out. He knew that I loved subtitled Scandi-Noir crime series on BBC4, not least because the English subtitles made it so much easier for me to follow. I was finally inspired to write this piece by a talk at the British Library earlier this month between the percussionist Evelyn Glennie and the neuroscientist Colin Blakemore called “Feeling Sound”.11 I greatly admire Evelyn’s approach to her hearing loss.12 So many people don’t understand that any loss, such as hearing or sight, exists on a spectrum. This can range from full loss, to partial loss or a very specific type of loss such as difficulty hearing sounds in a particular frequency range or distortion of some kind. For the person experiencing the loss, they are in some ways simply sensing the world around us all in a different way. It was a privilege to hear Evelyn describe how her first percussion teacher inspired her by asking her to take out her hearing aids and feel the sound of a drum in the room, through the walls and her body; and the fundamental impact that this had on her life. The change in my hearing has made me examine my relationship with sound and music at a detailed level over many years. I have evolved different coping mechanisms for different musical situations. I listen in a different way, and whilst it is sometimes exhausting, I wonder if I also take something different away because I analyse and unpack what I am hearing so carefully. During the talk, Evelyn was asked if she had considered some of the surgical procedures available, such as cochlear implants, to restore some of her hearing. She said she had thought about it, but ultimately no, she didn’t want the procedure. "I have spent so long hearing and listening in my own way and refining all my other senses in order to do what I do, to suddenly have everything changed at the age I am would be a risk I do not wish to make." 13 Notes
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In 2009 I was a burnt-out Finance professional, working in High Street Fashion Retail at the start of the longest and deepest economic downturn I had experienced in my lifetime. I felt jaded about my industry. I was lucky to work in design-led, aspirational brands that produced beautifully constructed pieces, designed to last. However I couldn’t ignore the other brands in my industry producing tonnes of cheap clothing made from non-biogradable man-made fibres that were destined for landfill. Or the change in attitude caused by clothing so cheap that a garment could be bought for a night out and then discarded. Or the plight of the people that made them, only made visible by terrible tragedies such as the garment factories that collapsed in the Rana Plaza catastrophe in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2013. I felt uneasy about the pressure the industry placed on consumers to replace clothing every season, to discard rather than cherish, so that daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual sales and margin forecasts could be met. My job and the success of my brands depended on people buying things they didn’t need, and maybe couldn’t afford. If they couldn’t buy it full price that was ok, we had already factored markdown into our buy, we would get you later. Except that this just isn’t sustainable in any sense of the word.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to look good; clothing is a way to show individuality. After years working in fashion I know the value of a well thought out accessory, and I love putting an outfit together. An outfit that makes me feel great can change how I feel about my day, I step out with a spring in my step, and I am not ashamed of that. I also appreciate the supremely comfortable clothes that seem to hug me on a cold Winter’s day, or float around my skin on hot sultry evenings. I think carefully before I let a new piece into my wardrobe; it has to work with what I already have, be beautifully made, washable and ideally made of a natural fabric. I can sew and have always repaired things rather than throw them away. I have pieces that I have bought on trips that I cannot easily buy again, so I wash them with care, iron them with respect and fix them when they start to disintegrate. I am probably one of the few people my age that knows how to darn a sock, and actually does it. It is always hard to arrive at the painful point when I have to acknowledge that the garment I love no longer makes me feel good because it is worn beyond repair. I have a deep relationship with my clothing which couldn’t be further from the ‘throw away’ culture. Recently though, this relationship has changed. I have lost a lot of weight in the 8 months since my husband died. He died in the Spring and I was vaguely aware that many of my Summer clothes were very baggy and I wasn’t looking my best, but so much was wrong at that time that it didn’t seem so important. I bought a new dress for the funeral, but other than that I soldiered on, tightening belts on skinny jeans that were now baggy round the bum, cinching in dresses at the waist, tucking tops into trousers to stop them slipping down (rather than wearing them loose, which I used to do to hide my ‘muffin top’). The clothes were the same but I looked very different. As the seasons changed, I got out the Winter clothes stored under my bed, looking forward to wearing old friends. However every time I pulled on an old favourite it felt all wrong. I was arriving at work later and later every morning; I wasn’t sleeping and I have never been a morning person, but this was now compounded by a new problem – I was trying on several outfits before I could leave the house. I had to work through the pile of Winter clothes, trying each piece on, assessing, and realising it didn’t just look slightly large, it was all wrong. I might finally find a top that sort of worked, but the coordinating skirt then fell off my hips. Then I couldn’t find anything else that went with the top, so I started again, and so on. I persevered, wearing things anyway, desperate for them to work. I had altered as many things as I could, but the weight continued to fall off, and another dress size hit the road. The problem had gone way beyond tightening my belt (which was also way beyond the smallest buckle hole). Even my underwear didn’t fit. People started to ask me if I was ill. I started to wonder if I was ill. Losing weight is so often associated with looking good, and I had been trying to lose a few pounds for years, but such a sudden loss, accentuated by my baggy wardrobe, simply made me look…well…probably how I was feeling. I was trying to fit into a new solo life, still dealing with the huge weight of probate bureaucracy, worried about my future, uncomfortable in many social settings. One more of the many secondary losses* that come with suddenly losing a life partner through death; loss of identity and sense of self. I had to take back control. I needed to feel good about myself. I started running again, to reconnect with my body. I began to trust it again; I wasn’t ill and I was still strong. A week out on a Healthy Holiday** boosted my tone and my sleep, so I started to look healthy rather than ill. Now it was time to turn the time, care and attention that I had applied to recycling my husband’s beautiful wardrobe to my own. I carefully sorted all of my clothes into categories – what could still be altered, what could be sold on Ebay, what could be given to charity shops, what was beyond repair and had to be consigned to the dustbin. A lady messaged me after buying one of my dresses on Ebay to tell me how lovely it was, and how much she enjoyed wearing it. It made me happy to think that other people might love my things as much as I had, and anything I sold gave me a fighting fund to start again. This was the first time I had bought new clothing on this scale for a long time and I needed it! It hasn’t been easy. Rather than my style evolving (or not) over time, I have had to have a total rethink. My body shape is so different that I can wear things I would never have considered before, but two decades have passed since I was last this shape. It has taken time to adjust. Now people have started telling me I look great but I am cautious. I didn’t dislike my curvier self and I was always very fit, I could always run 10k comfortably. I realised I was made to feel uneasy about my curves by other people. I could easily put the weight back on again and I need to feel OK with that. I now understand that I am still me, whatever my shape. I like looking good but I realise, more than ever now, that we should never judge anyone for their shape or appearance. It is more important to know what is happening inside. *Secondary Loss — one loss isn’t enough??!! **At the Body Retreat with the lovely Juls and Julie |