Dancing To Silence

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True Story
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I am deaf, but I wasn’t born like this and I don’t want this to define me. When I was only seven, an epidemic broke out in the city where I lived, and I fell victim to it. My fever raged for a good long week and I could feel a strange buzzing in my ears. Progressively, the clogging in my ears turned painful. I screamed my lungs out when I was in deep distress and I gripped my ears with both my hands. My mother realised that it was no ordinary fever, and rushed me to the doctor. I was treated for the fever, which gradually subsided, but my hearing was affected for all time. My world turned silent. It took a long while for me to understand the enormity of the problem that I was now faced with. Nobody in my family had guessed that the fever had left me permanently disabled. I had mastered lip reading very quickly.It was only gradually that it dawned upon them that I had indeed turned stone deaf.


Acceptance came very slowly for me and my family. There were innumerable challenges that I had to face while negotiating life on a daily basis. My parents used to despair when I was bullied at school and came home feeling like the unluckiest person on Earth. I was constantly in and out of doctors’ clinics to resolve my hearing problem and a number of aids were tried out but to no avail. My mother was my champion and I’ve always had her back. She was very determined that I should never lose out on a fine education. She became my ‘ears’ and helped me keep up with my lessons in school. And so the years went by till I was in high school.


“You’re doing really well sweetie!!” My mom mouthed while I was doing math. Great. I knew that I was bad at math, and I didn’t need my mom’s ‘encouraging’ words. Ever since I lost my hearing, the only thing I’ve been really good at is dance. I had an inherent sense of rhythm. You might wonder how I could dance when I can not hear the music. Even if I couldn’t hear the music, I could feel its beat, but here I was, stuck doing math, when my real passion was dance...

“Echo Elizabeth Foster!” Mom shouted, ( I was guessing because of her livid expression) Stop daydreaming and solve the equations! Uh oh. She only says my full name when she is really mad, and she knows I hate my first name, Echo, who is the Greek goddess of hearing. It’s ironic that I lost my hearing although I was named after the goddess of sound. When my full name was called, I got really mad and had laser focus. I finished my homework in a few minutes.


The next day, while going to class, I saw a poster for a local dance competition. I registered for it since it was free, I figured why not? I still get a chance to dance.I began practicing in earnest, I got more and more invested in the competition, and I realised that I wanted to win this one really badly. Much against the wishes of my parents, who felt that dance would not take me very far in life, I rehearsed in the school gymnasium after school hours. I had told my parents that I had signed up for a club held after school.


On the day of the competition, i was both nervous and excited. When i was about to go on stage, I spotted a note in my bag. It said, “Hey deaf girl! You must be really smart to be able to talk and dance and do regular things.” This really angered me and once again, I had laser focus. I landed on every beat correctly and would you believe it! I WON THE COMPETITION !! I was awarded an international scholarship to do a double major in dance and English at an Ivy League college in America.

That competition really boosted my confidence, and opened up doors to a grand future. I had conquered deafness, and it was no longer an obstacle for me. I have never been able to figure out who wrote that discouraging note and stuffed it in my bag just before the dance competition. I will only remember that was what fuelled me to perform to the best of my ability, and turn the tide in my favour.

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