So Info started by breaking the rules and asking me how I was when she came out to get me. We agreed months ago she wouldn’t do that because it made me self-conscious, especially if others were around.

But, she remembered she wasn’t supposed to do that and apologized. She has this awful new arrangement of furniture that means we sit further apart, and it makes it harder for me to hear her. So between that and the fact she was chewing a candy when we started, which interfered with hearing her clearly, I ended up snapping at her, “I feel like you don’t take my hearing disability seriously.” Because, like every other person with normal hearing, she forgets she needs to talk a bit differently. I need people to meet me part of the way if they want to communicate with me and vice versa. Apparently she thinks what I would call a voice just below normal range is shouting. I grew up part Greek. It has to be a LOT louder before I actually think someone is yelling at me.

So she moved and sat on the couch opposite my chair and we talked about the hearing for the first time. Feeling freakish. Feeling abnormal. Being bullied, not just for the hearing but for daring not to hide my intelligence in school. I even told her about the episode last weekend here on PC where some poster I don’t know called me the dumbest PC poster ever (fortunately I developed a thick skin in grade school).

In some ways my disability has been a blessing—it has trained my brain to think a certain way that is helpful in my field, and it means I am so used to being different that it doesn’t much concern me when I am different from the group—and in others it has been a curse, an easy way for 2ex to hurt me, and difficulty in forming relationships. I’m not sure she understood the first part, but at least she is aware of it now.

I don’t remember too much specific after the first ten minutes. But she listened, and I think she learned. The fall was so taken up with the No. 3 drama that in some ways I don’t think she even knows about half my issues yet.

Her only misstep was proposing EMDR to deal with the feelings around the disability. No thanks.

I may have annoyed her when she suggested I “make space” for an emotion she claimed she saw in my eyes (I didn’t feel any emotion), and I got up and sat on the arm of my chair. She asked what I was doing and I said, “making space for the emotion.” Hey, I thought it was funny.

But otherwise she continues her sudden surprising morph into a saner therapist.