copyright Kimberly Birkland 2007




“Kim, come here. Kim, turn around.”
They thought I was being stubborn when I didn’t turn around. I was a very stubborn child, I always had a mind of my own, so they figured I was just being “Kim again.” I always ran away with my back to them, and I couldn’t hear them saying my name, time and time again. They figured since I went to a private Episcopalian school where they supposedly had hearing tests every year, that this was not the problem.

Every year I went into this room, not even a sound-proof booth, just a room. There was a lady that had a sound machine, and she put a pair of complicated, big earphones on me. She slowly rotated the dials, checked all of the settings, and paused. I was facing straight towards her in a stiff metal chair. Even though I didn’t hear anything, I pressed the shiny, round, smooth button that was placed in my hand. I didn’t know why I did this, I guessed I just wanted to be normal like everyone else. I wanted to pass this test, because I always passed tests. I passed every year, and the school never notified my parents, so they had nothing to suspect. I always had to be right, and I wasn’t going to fail a test. I was good at everything, and this was one other thing I had to pass. With flying colors. I had no idea that I might be deaf, and that this little test would have anything to do with it. I left the booth with a sense of adequacy, with a sense of being a typical young child in a confusing world.

But the real truth was I was deaf. I had no idea of why people did things or why I was supposed to do things. I couldn’t hear a damn thing. My life was composed of images. I saw everything, and my mind was like a video camera. If I tried to remember something, it was a silent movie. I had color, but it was silent and constantly changing. Even if I closed my eyes, I could see the world through darkness. I could see people and places and numbers and words and everything else my world was composed of.

When I was young I had a better sense of hearing, because all of the fluid in my ear that had caused my deafness was accumulated through a series of otitis media (ear infections) that gradually led to the decay of my hearing so that I was underwater. I remember the chronic ear infections when I was a very young child. Nights spent with pain drumming at my ears like a power drill. My ears were throbbing and they hurt just to touch them. All of the doctor’s visits, all of the antibiotics, but they never suspected the level to which this was affecting my hearing. Nobody had cause to worry. Because, when I was a baby I could orient to sound and people’s faces when they were talking to me, thus I learned language and words. I used my facility of language and began to lip read when my hearing began to decline.

Being the first child, my parents were not inured to the ways of parenting. They thought they had a perfect little daughter, with bright blonde hair and large blue eyes. They didn’t want anything to be wrong with me. They decided later that maybe they talked louder to me and didn’t even realize that they were doing this. Perhaps they thought I just liked a lot of sensory stimuli, and that my way of processing information was a bit different than other kids. There are lots of notes in my baby book about how I like loud noises and shoes that “clicked” a lot.

I remember being in Sun Valley, Idaho and my parents dropped me off to ski on Dollar Mountain while they went to Baldy, the more challenging one. I was four years old. I was in ski lessons, and they just dropped me off with the teacher where the lessons were starting. I didn’t know what to do so I picked one kid to follow all day. I followed him to the chairlift, sat on the chair behind him, and followed him down the little hill. I even tried to make my tracks in the snow even with his. I sat on my butt sometimes and just slid down out of sheer exhaustion and utter boredom. I wasn’t really doing much “skiing” at this age. When it was time to go home, there were so many yellow buses, I couldn’t figure out which one I was supposed to get on. Nobody told me where to go so I just followed this kid. I got on the bus that he was on, and hoped for the best. I ended up being the last one on the bus, in the last row, and by the end of the trip, the bus driver barely even noticed me. I walked to the front and asked, “where do I go?”

“Where are you staying?”

My mind was a blur and I started to get scared. My palms were sweating profusely and I got really hot. I couldn’t remember. I remembered the condominiums, their dark brown exterior, the trails in the snow in front, the cars, and I remember a heated swimming pool with lots of steam coming up where I had learned to swim. I remembered this and described to him that it was right across from the “big people’s mountain.” That was Baldy Mountain. He drove me by there, around in circles, and finally I recognized the spot. The problem was, there was no sign. The place was called “Warm Springs Ranch” I think, but without a visual sign, I was lost. I finally jumped out of the bus when I recognized the spot and waved goodbye to the bus driver.

I knocked on the glass door of my parents’ condominium, and they let me in. They had no idea what I had been through, so I didn’t bother to tell them. I just didn’t go to ski lessons anymore without them, I threw a fit and acted terrified. All that I liked about ski lessons anyway was the warm hot chocolate in the lodge. I remember the aroma and the taste to this very day. I was only four years old, so I wasn’t doing much skiing anyways. My skiing mainly consisted of sliding on my bottom down the mini hill.


They didn’t begin to notice anything until they saw the report cards that said “does not follow instructions, does not seem to be paying attention.” My mother immediately thought that maybe I DID have trouble hearing, not at an alarming rate, but told the teacher to put me in the front of the classroom. Half way through the school year when my mother received the same complaints on my report card, she went to pick me up at school and sure enough, I was in the back row. My mom decided it was time to pull me out of the private school and put me somewhere else.

Before I left Oregon Episcopal School, I was still in a fishbowl. When I was 6 or 7 is when I believe my hearing had gotten to it’s worst point. Being hard of hearing, this made my world silent. This silence was terrifying. It was like seeing a murder about to happen and not being able to scream. There was a gleaming sharp knife above a pale white throat and I saw it coming closer. I could scream, but if I screamed, no one could hear my screams. I could not hear my scream. There was a horror in my life that no one could tangibly emulate. It was a silent and intangible terror. I screamed forever in my dreams, and no one heard me, mainly myself. Everything slowly became silent, always and forever.


I lived mainly inside of my head. I lived in a silent world of mystification, but with an order that I had created all on my own. I read, and I understood words, and I could lip read enough to get by. I could lip read simple words, and I knew what words meant because at an early age I had a good education in English. The dictionary was my best friend. I could read, and therefore could understand ideas. My world was a heady mix of internal thoughts and cerebral concentration.

I thought this was it. There was nothing more to this world, and I experienced everything that other kids did as well. I thought I was just different, confused. I thought I wasn’t as smart as the other kids. I just felt a sense of alienation from day one.

I remember pressing my ear against the plastic speaker in the trunk of the wagon. We drove a 1987 Chevrolet station wagon that was roomy and spacious. I would climb in the back and over the tires there were two huge speakers. I would press my ear hard down on the cold, hard plastic and listen to the beautiful music, the lulling tones, the treble, the bass, the lyrical notes. Oh God, this was the best pleasure I ever had. The only thing I really heard. My mom looked back at me through the rear view mirror…

“Kim, what are you doing back there?”

If I could hear her, I just said “I’m listening to the music, turn it up! Turn it up!”

But I rarely heard her, and she thought I was just being odd and funny, but she always knew that I wanted it really loud. From the second I got in the car I would yell,
“Turn Z100 on really loud mom! Please!”

I had a specific radio station that I had to listen to. It was all pop music. Madonna, Prince, Paula Abdul, Tiffany, they were my heartstrings. They echoed the emotions I felt inside. The elation, the euphoria, the grandiosity, the dreams, everything. They made sense of what I was feeling in sound. I had never had this type of beautiful sound in my ears until I discovered these speakers and headphones. I grew up in the good old 80’s when people really knew how to make a song, and make it catchy. I eventually grew to love music, and to have everything that had to do with it.

Quickly I got my own record player, tape player, and walkman. My parents didn’t mind buying me all these things, they always just wanted me to be happy. Since they figured I was an unhappy child as it was, if anything would ameliorate my malaise, they would buy it for me. But they could never buy me happiness or a sense of normalcy. Because of this, once again, I retreated to my private world. I would listen to music in my walkman all day. On the way to walk to the school bus, on the way back, on the bus, in my bedroom while I was cleaning, before I went to bed, during my baths (I got the waterproof walkman by Sony later), and I preferred this to the confusing chatter of my peers. I couldn’t hear them, but I turned the walkman up to maximum volume, and it was the beauty and the sound that lit up my life.


When they sent me to daycare or any other form of babysitting, I was confused. The nanny or mother would tell me to bring lunch or a bathing suit or something else, and I didn’t hear her so I would never be prepared. This was always an embarrassment when it came to lunchtime and I had no food, or we would go swimming and I had no bathing suit. My mom thought they were providing lunch for me. One time when we went to the pool I had to wear an adult’s old bathing suit that they put safety pins on and knotted up so that it fit me. When I waded into the water I remember the swimsuit blew up like a big balloon and kept on going further and further away from my body. The faded crimson red bobbed up and down in the steamy water and revealed my nakedness. I had a great feeling of vulnerability and alienation. Why couldn’t I just have a bathing suit that fit me like everyone else? How did they always know what to bring? Did the teachers tell their parents to bring them lunch, bathing suits, and all the proper attire? Were my parents not listening to them? Or maybe they just didn’t tell my parents. Maybe my parents were in a hurry when they came to pick me up. I didn’t understand. So I sat on the very edge of the steaming pool and sank down into the side so that no one could see me through the steam. There were boys out in the pool chasing after the girls and girls laughing and screaming as they taunted each other. My heart sank as I saw them play with each other, and I yearned to be one of those “normal” girls. They had mothers that put their hair into pretty braids and French braids and pig tails. My hair was always cut short for some reason, a “bowl” cut, my bright white hair surrounding my face like a halo. I didn’t mind, but I don’t know why my mom always had it cut like that. I just figured that that’s the way she liked me to look, so I went along with it. I always dreamed of long hair, and literally had dreams of having long, luscious hair with little waves, and then I woke up, felt my hair, and my dreams went flying out the window. I looked in the mirror just to check again, and there it was, short and fluffy, yet very straight, and very bright white.


There is a picture of me from kindergarten. Sitting in a yellow sunbonnet with a veil coming down my face as I was playing dress up. My hair was cut the same way around my face, I looked like a little angel, and my bangs were getting a little long so they almost covered my eyes. I was feigning a normal child-like routine at the kindergarten I was attending. I have no expression on my face except for one of utter confusion. I look into the camera lens with an alienating vacancy that tricks the lens into thinking there is not much behind those big blue-gray eyes. When actually, behind those eyes lies a world that no one can possibly imagine. It is so big, so vast, so grandiose in thought and form that only I could conceive of it. My mind was bubbling over and fizzing with thoughts all day.

I would make up lands, people, stories in my head. I pretended like I was always in a movie and I was the heroine, the femme fatale, the one that everyone watched and loved. I lived for this invisible camera that no one could see. I felt so special, so ahead of my time, so important, that I knew, I was just certain there would be a movie about me one day. I felt like a superstar from the time I was born. I would write my name over and over just to get down what my signature would look like when I had to write it down on so many posters and cards and papers. I knew I was destined for fame.

There I was in school, playing with toys the way I saw other kids play with them, but I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t understand the functions of these toys and what I was supposed to get out of it. I wondered how everyone else knew the right buttons to push on the toys that made them pop, move, circle around, or jump up out of the box. I didn’t really hear the horns and all the other little trinkets, so that part completely passed me by.

I resorted to something sensory. I would run my hand through the sandbox for hours at a time. I didn’t play with the trucks or the dolls in the sand box, I just ran my hands through the sand and over the sand and felt the grains slip through my fingers. I remember thinking to myself if I could just somehow keep the sand from falling maybe everything would be okay. I pictured one of those sand hourglasses, and as the time ticked away, I pictured death and decay. I pictured those withered bones and bodies that I saw on TV for the Save The Children advertisements. I pictured the funeral I went to for my great-grandfather and all the black attire and veils and hats. I never wanted to die. I didn’t want anyone to die. I was always afraid of loss, perhaps because so many things in my life did slip away. My friends began to wither, my parents began to fade (as they were more often going on trips on the weekends to ski resorts and I was staying with their friends), and my love of life began to drift off and a new sense of sadness came over me.

So I began to construct things out of the sand that were high and statuesque. Grand things, that only I could conceive of because I knew I was that special. Nobody ever came and sat on or ruined my castles and my mountains. They left me alone.

By this time, I was in first grade, and I had no friends to speak of, and no one to really talk to. I couldn’t hear what they were saying and I generally wasn’t into what they were doing. I couldn’t understand instructions from the teacher. All I could do was follow people to where we were herded off to. I could hear the whistle of the teacher when it was time to go inside and recess was over. I hated for things to be over. When things were over the fantasyland would end and reality would kick in. My lonely, isolated, silent world was so depressing.

I didn’t understand mathematics at all, because when the teacher explained math, she was usually facing the blackboard so that I couldn’t even read her lips. I did very poorly on math assignments. The only thing I excelled in was reading. We were given passages to read, and then questions to answer, and I always excelled in that. I wasn’t too good at reading out loud because I couldn’t really hear myself, which made me overcompensate. I talked very, very loud, it must have sounded like shouting to the rest of the class, because often they would all look at me, like I was abnormal or something, and once the teacher told me “you don’t have to be so loud Kim.” Oh, it was embarrassing. My face turned red and I turned around to all the kids and they quickly looked down like they hadn’t been staring, which I knew they had been.


I was always engaged in fantasy, when I learned to read, I could go places even further away from this world than I already was. I understood words, I understood what this all meant, because I learned about the world through words, through reading everything. There was nothing I couldn’t spell. I went to spelldowns at the age of 10. I always baffled my teachers by getting bad grades but beating everyone else out in the competition of the spelling bees. Aside from these small feats of excelling, I lived in depression. I was always sad, and I was very sad when birthdays and holidays were over. Those were the only things that made me happy, presents and holidays and birthdays. Then I got depressed and gave all my presents away. I felt like I didn’t deserve them anymore, an impending sense of guilt. I was a sad kid living in a world of misery because I was all alone, all alone in an underwater silence.

There were no rules in this world and nothing made sense. I could only sit, stare, and think. I would go places in my head all of the time. I would write stories about lands in the forest that I saw when we drove in our car up to the mountain. Every time we went on a trip in the car I would stare out at the scenery and think of all the gnomes, trolls, fairies, and elves that lived in the woods or beside the road that we just couldn’t see. I believed in these things because perhaps part of me wanted a break from reality. I would make up stories about them, perhaps I even saw them a few times, out of the blur of colors from my little window in the backseat.

One time I told my parents about these ideas I had in my head and my dad told me that people don’t want to hear about that stuff because they want to know about “real life.” People were interested in other people and such, but I had no interest. Maybe I didn’t hear him right. I only heard the words “real life.” “Real” had no meaning for me. Nothing was real. I didn’t know how to tell time so events were just an ephemeral kinetic smear for me on my visual plate. When things were over, people just disappeared and all of the dishes were put away. It made me so sad because I never knew how to anticipate the beginning or end of anything. Things were usually preceded by a car drive or setting of the table or wrapping of presents, and I would get very excited. But when things wound down, what did I have left? I played alone with paper dolls I made out of a cut-out book and put my things in order.

Obsessed with cleanliness and neatness I spent most of my time applying logic and reason to a mess of my life that I couldn’t make sense of. Somehow, if everything in my room just had a place and stayed there like it should. If all the bits of dust were clear and everything gleamed just so, maybe I had a space and a place that I could rely on. I could know. This was my room. I constructed my room to be perfect and exact, just like I wanted my life to be. In reality, it became the site of many breakdowns, fits of crying, nights of sleeplessness lost in nervous thoughts and fidgeting of my body.

There I was, unable to go to sleep, restless and anxious. I thought of all the things I would have to face the next day, and all of the hard tasks I would have to do. How would I find out where to sit for lunch? I guess I just followed my “friend” Jennifer, who was my only real friend because she seemed to like me no matter what my confusion was. She liked me because I had the biggest collection of Bonne Bell lip smackers. That was the coveted item of the year, and during recess I would proudly haul all of my lip smackers out in this little turquoise purse that I had gotten from one of my mom’s friends. It had a cartoon character on it, and it was big enough to hold my ten or so chapsticks. Everybody would get theirs out at recess, and I guess my mom just kept on buying them for me because she knew they made me happy and I loved their smells.

Smell was very important to me. It was something I could relate to. When I saw someone elses lipsmacker that was a different kind than mine, I noticed from the coloring of the label and the writing on the tube, I would ask to smell it, and when I smelled it all these memories and ideas would go floating through my head like a hundred balloons. When I smelled “root beer” I was taken back to being a child in a soda shop in Sun River, OR on a trip and how I always ordered root beer floats with a soft scoop of vanilla ice cream and savored the aroma and the taste for a good hour. I immediately had to go out and get that scent of chapstick or I wouldn’t feel satisfied. I smelled my chapsticks all the time, but I hardly ever wore them. Just like everything else I didn’t want to lose them, didn’t want them to run out. I stored them in my vanity with the mirror and all the other cosmetics that I had. I never opened my cosmetics, just kept all the packaging and plastic in place so they would be like new forever. I would always have the day when they were new, because they looked brand new. I never lost anything.

As I got older and went into the second grade, my mother told the teachers to put me in front of the class because she suspected I needed “special help.” They never listened to my mom and I never got the “special help”. Quickly my parents realized that for all they were paying this private school, I wasn’t succeeding as much as I should have been. My parents believed I was smart, they just thought I didn’t pay attention well enough. Just like when they called my name and I didn’t turn around. They took me out of the private Episcopalian school and sent me to public school. In third grade was when my life finally changed.


“The Hearing World”

My mom finally figured out that I might be hard of hearing, so she took me to an ear, nose and throat doctor (ENT). He checked my hearing and said it was akin to being underwater. I got tubes put in my ears, my adenoids taken out, and my tonsils taken out. All of these things were taken out to prevent further infections of the ear and to prevent more drainage from clogging up my ears. The tubes are little holes made by metal or plastic openings, which drain all the fluid out of my ears. “Tubes” are a simple word for a type of metal, or later on, plastic contraption which they put through the ear drum to drain out the fluid. It created an opening so that water, fluid, and air could pass through more easily and no longer would infections clog up my hearing. These tubes often fell out though, and I had to get multiple surgeries.

I was completely out. All I remember was the nurse telling me to “blow up a balloon.” There was a plastic mask over my face and I had to breathe into it until I filled up this red, rubber balloon. It didn’t really look like a balloon, and at the age of 7 I knew what a shiny red balloon should look like. It was a medical gadget filled with an amnesiatic gas that quickly put me to sleep.

When I woke up there was blood on the sheets. My mom took me home and all I could see was blurry cars and blurry people. I rested my head on the seatbelt and tried to rest. That night I woke up in the middle of the night and my ears had bled all over the pillows. I screamed and my parents woke up and came into my bedroom. I asked them over and over again “how many pages are in a book?” I had lost so much blood that I was becoming delusional and I couldn’t think anymore. They took me back to the hospital and I had to go surgery once again.

This was repeated three times over the years, as the tubes kept on falling out and the drainage kept on building up. It was a chronic situation, and all of these surgeries were so painful and draining to me. I was in and out of hospitals a lot, and I began to know the smells, the sights, and the sounds of illness. I always wanted to go home to the smells and comfort of health.


Finally, the world wasn’t so quiet, but it wasn’t so different. There was always a cacophony of sounds that I couldn’t make sense of. I could only talk one on one to people because in a conversation with more than one person, I couldn’t follow more than one line of conversation. I got so confused in a room full of people with a bunch of people chattering away, I just blocked it out and regressed back to my world of silence. All of the sounds became one loud sound, and I blanked it out and it usually went away.

I couldn’t swim underwater because I had these holes in my ears, so I had to wear earplugs whenever I went swimming. This prevented me from playing with the other kids while I was at the pool, and we happened to have a pool in our neighborhood and I was always up there in the summer. These earlplugs also made me not able to hear what was going on. But I felt comfortable back in that world.

“Marco…. Polo…. Marco…. Polo….” I heard a little bit through the plugs, and I could hear the kids playing games in the water and I couldn’t take part. I sat on the side of the pool with my feet dangling over watching their excited faces. They didn’t even ask me why I wasn’t taking part. I just couldn’t. I would get in the shallow end, and slowly make my way across the pool with my head above the water at all times doing the “frog stroke”. I would go through their game and try not to hit any of the other kids and try not to disturb their game.

I watched kids get in line to do dives off the diving board, and knew that I would never learn how to do a dive because it would get water into these holes in my ears. I decided to just lay out in the sun and read my fantasy books. I was a big fan of Beverly Cleary, and currently was reading “Blubber.” “Blubber” made me feel comfortable, because it was about a young girl being teased about her weight and made to feel outcast, I liked “Blubber” and read the story twice one summer.

I shied away from big parties and events, I didn’t like them still. I still couldn’t understand what everyone was talking about and why. I didn’t understand actually why people talked at all. I didn’t understand what they were trying to get across. What was so important that they had to talk about all the time? Fixing my hearing didn’t really fix that much at all. My world just became noisier.

This sensory world of mine, lacking sound, made my internal world louder. I felt with such vigor, I laughed or cried with such intensity. Even if I couldn’t hear my own sobbing, I felt the tears with a pain I can still remember to this day. My stomach was always in knots. I had a nervous temperament and although I was usually not enraged or angered, I had an overwhelming sense of fatality and doom. I thought everything was doomed to be wrong. Although I still believed in my self-importance, I didn’t like other people. I didn’t even like my parents because I didn’t understand why they got mad at me when they did. I didn’t hear the rules when they were told. Living in my internal, visual world kind of made my life a silent movie. I was lost in a quagmire of sensory stimuli that I could not handle. I always thought to myself, I am too sensitive for this world.

This lack of sound in my early life, really led me to never take for granted the beautiful sounds that surround us everyday. Whether it is music, the rustling of the trees, or the toll of a church bell, let it ring in your ears.... For so many years I was deprived of this sense, and I will never know how it might have made me a different person if I could have taken part in this beautiful world in a different way. I know I made silence beautiful for myself and found other ways to enjoy this world, through all of my other senses, but there was always something missing. Now I play the violin to enjoy the beauty of music. I play until my callouses on my fingers are bleeding. I play until the music pulls on my heartstrings. I don't think I ever would have enjoyed music and sound as much as I do now unless I hadn't been denied it early on in life. Listen to the world around you, for it might not always be there. Listen. In silence.