silence & noise

I spend most of my time in silence these days.

It's not that I couldn't hear if I wanted to- I have a very convenient cochlear implant. (It even has Bluetooth!) But the silence and the quiet are my natural state.

It also means I don't have to deal with the clanking and rustling and other sounds that come from going through the old boxes of supplies in my closet.

I found this in one of those boxes. It's a good few years old; I made it no later than freshman year of high school, at least, if my memory serves me right here.  

I don't usually like to look back at those days. Right in the middle of the "abuse years," as I sometimes call them, before I'd figured out that anything was wrong. That time was a 24/7 identity crisis- a deaf kid in a mainstream school trying desperately to figure out what being Deaf actually was. 

(That's also when the OSDD kicked in and I split for the first time, so you know. My memory's a little bit blurry. It's a blessing.)

That's around the time my mother handed me this tag during one of my sewing expeditions, pulled from who-knows-what article of clothing. I was on a wristbands and found-objects kick at the time. It was great. 

So of course this is what I made with it.

(Nimoy is not impressed by my photography skills.)

I feel a lot quieter these days. My life is missing the constant abuse, the constant fear. The uncertainty. The gaslighting. The noise.

I'm healing, slowly. It's so strange to look back on something I made back then, something that seems to better fit what I am now than what I was when I made it.