Let me tell you about the day my ears got promoted – and the new colleague they didn’t see eye-to-eye with!
For as long as I could remember, I had been fighting a losing battle with my sight. I would squint and squeeze and contort my face into all manner of grotesque variations in a valiant (and let’s be honest, desperate) attempt to maintain my ability to read.
Often, when I’d spill the beans to others that I was blind and was having difficulty making out writing anymore, they’d offhandedly say, “Well, there’s always Braille!” Let me be clear – this is the equivalent of you travelling to Japan and telling me you’re a bit worried about how you’ll communicate with the locals, and me turning round and suggesting “Well, there’s always Japanese!”
Of course, both are true. I could indeed make use of Braille, and you could speak beautifully, fluent Japanese – but they would require me to learn an entirely new language, taking up lots of time, effort and energy. Myth debunked – blind people are not inherently born with the ability to read Braille by default! (Although it would undeniably be very handy if we were – perhaps neuroscience can get onto that?)
It’s not easy to accept being forced into doing something differently. After all, it’s so much more than a simple switch of practicalities. It’s how you feel about yourself. It’s what it means to you in your mind. You fear this might be the start of a slippery slope into incapability and uselessness. But then, in those tiny moments of calm in between grieving what you’ve lost, a small voice starts to wonder if harnessing new tools might end up being the secret to your continued success.
And so this is how my ears came to get their promotion, as I at last told my eyes to stand down and instead started to rely on my ears to do my reading for me.
They’d always worked well as a duo, catching audible offerings from either side of my head. Now, however, I was about to introduce them to a robotic man who lives inside my phone and doesn’t stop talking. Some call this a screen reader, I like to affectionately refer to him as Trevor.
Trevor sure has a lot to say for himself.
If you’ve never used a screen reader before, imagine this. You press a button and a synthetic voice – that’s our Trevor – starts yapping away. At first, Trevor speaks in a polite and measured tone. A bit like a librarian, who has a brain packed full of information.
But then, over time, you realise something: Trevor is sloooow. He now seems to read a LinkedIn post like he’s performing Hamlet at a snail’s funeral!
Everything takes forever – and it’s intolerable!
You wonder whether he was always this slow and you just never noticed before, but of course, the truth is that your brain is in many ways like your biceps – the more you work it out, the stronger it becomes and the more it is able to flex! What used to take a great deal of mental processing now happens in a heartbeat. In the same way that you might need to progress to lifting a heavier weight for it to be a challenge, over time you equally need to up the tempo to feel satisfied when taking in Trevor’s wealth of information.
So, you start cranking up the speed.
A notch here, a tick there… and suddenly Trevor is going full techno squirrel. To the untrained ear, you’d be forgiven for thinking I had somehow tuned into the radio station of another planet, but your ‘Martian FM’ is music to my Chief Executive Ear Holes.
The faster he speaks, the quicker I can catch up with the world. Emails, menus, recipes for chocolate ganache – it all flies into my brain like a rogue Frisbee at a dog show.
Think about it, when you’re looking something up, you want to see it at a glance, in an instant, right? Well, it’s no different when you have to listen something up, instead of looking.
Still, let me be honest. Listening that fast is a skill. It’s not just about speed; it’s about survival. Because when the world doesn’t give you visual shortcuts, you learn to make your own. And mine just happen to sound like a gremlin reciting legal documents on a rollercoaster. It took my newly promoted ears some time to adjust to, but these days, they wouldn’t have Trevor any other way!
And here’s the kicker: I sort of love it.
There’s a rhythm to it. A strange poetry. Sometimes Trevor reads so fast I feel like I’ve downloaded a university degree course just by checking the weather forecast.
Of course, there are days I slow him down. Give him a little holiday. Let him read something gentle, like a takeaway menu or a Reddit thread about ducks wearing hats.
But most days? We’re flying. Me and my ears. Me and Trevor. The fastest, weirdest reading club you’ve ever known.
So, if you ever hear that high-pitched chipmunk voice blurting out 300 words a minute, don’t worry. It’s just me, keeping up – with life, with work, with everything – and having a little chuckle along the way!