Let His Love Be Louder
By Caitlyn Fisher, Junior Ambassador-
Songs for Sound Foundation
“Your child has profound hearing loss.”
Even to this day, I can’t fathom the emotions that must have bubbled up inside of my mother like an overflowing pot of water, filling her mind with fear and her heart with a tug-of-war of questions that begged for answers.
At the young age of 8, I remember believing that this diagnosis provided me a sense of uniqueness, making me feel different in the best way…much like the colorful scales of the rainbow fish in one of my favorite story books.
To me, this diagnosis meant a beautiful new addition to who I was. But to my mom, this burden sat upon her shoulders like two of the world’s heaviest boulders, impossible to carry alone. As fondly as she looked at my excited face, every bone in her body felt as if this diagnosis was the opposite of an addition; it was a subtraction. A subtraction of sounds that her baby girl had never heard, and may never hear.
When the day eventually came for me to get my first pair of hearing aids, excitement filled me from head to toe. I sat adjacent to my audiologist as she hooked each one around my ears, and I gasped in amazement as the sound of the instruction manual my mom was flipping through began to fill my ears.
“Mom, I can hear the pages turning!”
Tears began to flow from her eyes as God whispered to her anxious heart,
“I’ve got this. I’ve got her. Just trust Me.”
As I walked into the doors of my elementary school on that fateful day, I expected everyone to swarm around me over my new hearing aids that made me feel a million times cooler than everyone else. In fact, I remember begging my mom to brush my hair into the tightest ponytail that I could handle, one that practically gave me a facelift.
However, I was instantly hit like a shot in the dark with the realization that my world full of rainbows and sunshine was no match for the real world. When people saw my hearing aids, they saw them as something that was wrong with me, rather than my hearing.
I became the “weird” outcast sitting by myself at lunch, and the spark of joy within me died as quickly as it had ignited. Associating that dying spark with my diagnosis, I began to hate my hearing aids altogether as I felt my true sense of self slipping away. I desperately searched for validation in people that repeatedly brought me down, and in a society where everything is photoshopped to look effortlessly perfect, none of my efforts could restore my perfect ideals.
Because my hearing aids still left me with significant deficiency in sounds, reading became my new bright and shiny world…one where there was always a happy ending, and I could understand everything that was typed upon the pages.
Reading became my own personal “closed captioning” for a world that was so muted with loneliness and the exclusion of anything and everything that dared to be different. I began to devour books by the whole and advanced my vocabulary to the point where, as a little girl, I could spell large words like “opthamologist.”
Yet even still, there were so many times I wondered why the people who seemed to want to hurt me were the ones I was radically kind to. I was so focused on my identity being placed in people and materialistic things, I was slowly becoming a stranger to myself.
I got infuriated over how easily others could focus in school by comparison to myself. Since my brain was not processing sounds that others could hear on a day-to-day basis, it worked in overdrive to compensate, bringing mental fatigue that made it hard to focus and concentrate. There were times when I would ask a teacher to repeat something for clarification, only to get a response that made my blood boil:
“You should have been paying attention.”
But at the end of the day, the times that broke me were also building me up. I was gaining compassion, strength, and later freedom with the fact that the only opinion that truly matters is my Creator’s opinion. And as painful as my past was, I know that if it weren’t for those years, I wouldn't be who I am today.
If you seek the world’s opinion of who you are, the world will try to put you inside its box, stamped with what it says you should be.
Seeking God’s opinion taught me that my hearing loss is not, and will never be, my crutch, my excuse, and especially not my identity. I now call it my “ear-dentity.” I consider it an addition to my identity…my story that The Perfect Author is writing for His glory.
In my loss of hearing, I gained a voice. I gained strength, the power of learning and growing, and opportunities to show others through my faith just how moveable mountains can be.
My hearing loss could have crippled me, and at times it made me feel smaller than a mustard seed. But God’s Word says, “If you have faith like a grain of mustard seed…nothing will be impossible for you.” (Matthew 17:20). When I began to choose my faith over my feelings, it proved to be the best decision I ever made.
With hearing aids behind my ears and God in my heart, I’ve been able to accomplish things that have grown my confidence and belief in what I’m capable of achieving. I’ve participated in the county spelling bee. I’ve sang my heart out in solos at school. I’ve danced with a company for six years. I’ve shared my story as a keynote speaker for Nashville Songs for Sound. I now have an A average as a student at my dream college, and I’m so excited for what is yet to come!
I’m choosing to let His love be louder.
I hope you do, too.
About Caitlyn Fisher
Caitlyn Fisher is a student at Samford University with plans to pursue a Doctorate degree in Psychology. Caitlyn has a passion to inspire others and provide resources for others who, like Caitlyn, have been diagnosed with profound hearing loss. She is a Junior Ambassador for the Songs for Sound foundation and was chosen as their keynote spokesperson of the year in 2018. Caitlyn hopes that through her story and shared reSOURCEs below, readers will gain a new sense of confidence with the fact that what appears to be a loss is truly a gain, when seen through the eyes of faith.
Caitlyn’s reSOURCEs
If you, or someone you know, has hearing loss:
How to help hard of hearing students: Earq.com
FAQ’s about hearing aids: FAQ
Recommended Instagram Accounts to follow:
@Christykeanecan- inspirer and mama of deaf and hard of hearing kiddos
@Jaimemvernon - blogger and founder of Songs For Sound
@Songsforsound- official foundation instagram account
Encouraging Bible verses:
Matthew 11:5 - “The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.”
Matthew 13:16 - “But blessed areyour eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear.”
Isaiah 29:18 - “And on that day shall the deaf hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind shall see out of obscurity, and out of darkness.”
Mark 4:23 - “If anyone has ears to hear, let them hear."