Living with Yourself

"You speak so quietly. You have a very soft voice." 

I laughed. Out loud. 

"What?" she asked. 

Quiet was just never something that I had considered myself. Ever. 

And yet, the more I thought about it, the more this speech therapist might have been onto something. Folks had been telling me my whole life how quiet I was, but I could never believe them. I've never felt quiet. In fact, every time I have opened my mouth, I have felt dramatically loud...which may be how I learned to be so quiet. 

Fast forward to this week, and I finally understand why. 

As it turns out, I have a medical condition that causes something called autophony - hearing your body sounds, including your voice, in your head. 

A couple of months ago, I was sitting around talking to my mom and was being driven crazy by a noise in my head that wouldn't stop, and I told her it was "like the sound you hear when you hear yourself blink" and she started laughing at me. It was the first time in my entire life that I started to think there was something abnormal about that. But I've always heard my own voice that way, too. So of course, I have always thought myself to be a loud person. 

Sometimes, to be fair, I am a little loud. Usually, that's because I'm self-conscious about being too quiet and am trying to project more. Whatever. 

Anyway, I tell you that story to tell you this: 

The condition that causes my autophony is also causing some of the other problems I'm dealing with, and after receiving a proper (though still preliminary, with more testing pending) diagnosis this week, I've been told there are options to fix it. Obviously, I got extremely excited about the opportunity to fix the other problems...problems that are frustratingly life-affecting. 

But that night, as I laid down and started to really process the hope and the fresh optimism that the day had brought me, I realized something: 

Fixing this problem would also affect my autophony. Fixing these other problems will affect how I hear my own voice. 

That realization stopped me in my tracks. 

All of a sudden, I wondered what it would be like to fundamentally change the way that I experience myself in the world. Seriously. I don't know what it's like for someone without autophony. I don't know if you can hear your own voice at all. I don't know if you only hear it coming into your ears. I don't know what it's like to live without this.

The way that this has the possibility of changing the way that I experience myself is...something to consider. 

Anyway, I tell you that story to ask you this: 

Of all the things you're fighting right now in your life, of all the things that are broken, of all the things that aren't the way you wish they would be...how would it change your experience of yourself to change them? Have you thought about the changes it would take in your own being to process something totally different about the human you know best in this world - yourself? How do you deal with that?