“I was in a gang growing up.”

“I’m a slam poet. I actually have a show on Friday if anyone is free.”

“I just moved here from Berlin.”

Well, geez. How was I supposed to follow those? I was 21, in a two-week training that kicked off my AmeriCorps year, faced with the hated icebreaker “Tell us a fun fact about yourself.” I could think of no fun facts about myself.

But then I remembered one:

“I was born deaf.”

Eyebrows went up. Win!

It was a cheap victory, though, because it sounds more dramatic than it is. I couldn’t hear as a newborn because of an ear infection I had in the womb. My parents noticed that I didn’t cry much or react to loud noises. Alarmed, they began to get used to the idea of raising a deaf child, learning sign language, etc. But then the doctor informed them that it was only an infection, and antibiotics took care of it. A week later, I was a normal baby who cried at loud noises. My parents mentioned it once in a while, but I mostly forgot about it.

*

Two years earlier, at 19, I had fallen and cracked my skull, which caused tinnitus in my left ear. Anyone with tinnitus knows it’s awful. I was a music major, and for months, before a chiropractor figured out the cause and adjusted my neck, allaying the worst of the ringing, I could not listen to music or practice piano without setting off alarm bells in my left ear. The idea that I would never again enjoy music nor experience silence was one that left me stricken, in tears.

At 21, the tinnitus had vastly improved–but it was still there, and I still struggled to find peace with it.

But then my brain randomly reminded me–“I was born deaf”–and I understood something.

I could have stayed deaf.

What if my ear infection hadn’t responded to the meds, or if my parents hadn’t discovered it in the first place? Suddenly I was aware of just how close I’d come to never hearing at all.

Sounds flooded my mind, melodies I adored and harmonies that gave me tingles: the vocal jumps in “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters,” my mother playing Gordon Lightfoot on the piano, any second in any song by my beloved Phish.

My hearing had never been a guarantee. It was a bonus. A privilege, not a right. A gift, not a given.

Suddenly tinnitus seemed like way less of a curse.

Hearing, however imperfectly, was a world away from not hearing at all.

What isn’t this true about? Everything around me, everyone around me, could just as easily not have been. Everything in my life is a gift, not a given.

I only thought of that perspective flip because I was scrolling through LinkedIn a few days ago and saw a post about a book by a man who’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer in his forties. The author wrote about how the diagnosis made him see his life in technicolor, made him appreciate every little detail. And instead of making him sad to lose it, he realized how blessed he was to have it at all.

Reading that post, the memory of that day in AmeriCorps training materialized in front of me. I began to write about it, and I was 21 again, realizing what a gift it is to hear, even ringingly. And it was only then that I realized just how profound it was. And still is.

This is what happens when I write, especially about seem like little moments. Deeper truths come to light. Life lessons come out of the woodwork. Writing is a way to “find out what you know,” as Joan Didion said. Writing is, in the words of the Jewish mystic Ben Bag Bag, to “turn it, and turn it again, for everything is in it.”

Writing is sifting through the sand of ordinary moments and (often) finding bits of gold.

Writing makes a moment like this one more real, more vivid; its lesson more distilled, more clear.

That’s what writing is for.

If you’re looking for some structure and guidance as you write your book, schedule a call with me. As a book coach and ghostwriter, I can help you write your story and bring your book to life.