Rebecca Alexander: Living with Adversity

Join me in a moving conversation with Rebecca Alexander.  In this conversation, Rebecca takes a deep dive into her own life that she has graciously shared in her published book “Not Fade Away: A Memoir of Senses Lost and Found”.  Rebecca is a psychotherapist, extreme athlete, and activist. She grew up in Northern California and holds 2 master’s degrees from Columbia University. She lives in New York City. She was born with Usher syndrome Type III.  In this podcast she shares her incredible story, the importance of feeling emotions and living with adversity, embracing humor in hard circumstances, and surrounding yourself with those who walk beside you.  In this podcast, Rebecca shares several stories about her diagnosis of Ushers as well as her journey to getting a cochlear implant.  Rebecca sets an example of choosing to be grateful, be happy with what you have today, and be optimistic about tomorrow.  

Be sure to connect with Rebecca on social media:

www.rebalexander.com  (can find her book Not Fade Away)

www.rebeccaalexandertherapy.com

IG: reb_alexander

twitter: reb_alexander

You can listen to this episode on most podcatchers or at www.3cdigitalmedianetwork.com/empowear-audiology-podcast

For more information about Dr. Carrie Spangler- check out her Linktree at https://linktr.ee/carrie.spangler.

For transcripts of this episode- visit the podcast website at: https://empowearaudiology.buzzsprout.com

Transcript

Announcer: [00:00:00] Welcome to episode 48 of empowEar Audiology with Dr. Carrie Spangler.
Carrie: [00:00:15] Welcome to the empowEAR  Audiology Podcast, which is part of the 3C Digital Media Network. My name is Dr. Carrie Spangler and I am your host. I am a passionate audiologist with a lifelong journey of living with hearing challenges in this vibrant hearing world. This podcast is for professionals, parents, individuals with hearing challenges and those who want to be inspired. Thank you for listening and I hope you will subscribe, invite others to listen and leave me a positive review. I also wanted to invite all of you to visit and engage in the conversation and the empowEAR Audiology Facebook group. Transcripts for each episode can be found at www dot 3 the number three C Digital Media network dot com under the empowerEAR Podcast tab. Now let's get started with today's episode. Welcome to the empowEAR Audiology podcast. I am really excited today to have a special guest with me and I'm going to read a little about my guest and then I will introduce her. So today I have with me Rebecca Alexander and she is a psychotherapist, an extreme athlete and an activist. She grew up in north Northern California, and she holds two master's degrees from Columbia University. She currently lives in New York City. She is the author of the book Not Fade Away. And she was born with Usher Syndrome Type three. In this book, she shares an incredible story and meditates on what she's lost from the sound of a whisper to seeing a sky full of stars and what she has found with others, a profound sense of gratitude for everything. She has a joy in the simple pleasures of life. So, Rebecca, thank you for being a part of the podcast today.
Rebecca: [00:02:24] Thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.
Carrie: [00:02:27] Well, I just want to take this opportunity to share the first time I met you. And I don't know, I don't think you really met me, but I saw you at a conference in Massachusetts, and you were the keynote at the Clarke mainstream conference, and you just shared your story. You were so authentic and real, and I was just so grateful to have heard you at that point in time. And I don't know if you remember, but at that conference, there was probably several hundred attendees there, and there was one girl who and her mom, and she raised her hand and she shared with the entire conference that she had recently been diagnosed with Ushers. And I remember you graciously going over to her and you just stood face to face with her and you had this conversation of support and empathy and gave her this big hug. And I thought, wow, I don't think there was a dry eye in the whole audience that day. But at that point I thought, you are truly a person that listens and you make that person, whoever you're with, make them feel like the most important person in the world at the moment. So thank you for who you are, and I'm so excited to have a conversation with you.
Rebecca: [00:03:54] Thank you. Yeah. I mean, that was a really mean. Of course I remember it. I don't think it's something you could forget, but I think sometimes when we're out here and these days with social media and all these different outlets, people lose sight of the fact that we're all human beings, that we have real lives and real stories and real emotions. And so being at that conference, this was before COVID, I believe. So even just being able to be there with someone with a girl and her mom not that long after her diagnosis, I think the emotions were still very raw. And so I really appreciated their standing up and even being willing to share with with me and also the group.
Carrie: [00:04:37] Right. And then I got to reconnect with you just a couple of months ago, and then I officially got to introduce myself to you. And you were a panelist for the American Cochlear Implant Alliance. And that's when I thought, Hey, I'm going to see if she would be willing to be on the podcast today. So thank you for joining.
Rebecca: [00:05:00] Absolutely. I think it was all kind of came in full circle.
Carrie: [00:05:04] It did. It did before COVID and right after COVID, right when we could get back together again.
Rebecca: [00:05:11] Yeah, Yeah.
Carrie: [00:05:13] So I know you have I read your book and I think I laughed, I cried. I could empathize. I had some empathy for parts of the book because I share some of the similar journey as you did. But I thought I would ask you what just prompted you to write this amazing book?
Rebecca: [00:05:35] Yeah. So, you know, it's interesting. There is a definitely a process to it. I mean, some years before I actually wrote it, I was approached by an agent, a literary agent who had seen an article that was written about me for New York magazine, and it was called Going Deaf and Blind in a City of Noise and Lights. And so I think it was a sort of a provocative story about living with the condition that causes progressive deaf blindness and being in a very chaotic, noisy city because I'm in New York City. And so when he first approached me, I thought, what possibly do I have to say that anybody cares to listen to or read about? And what I realized over some time. So I said, I don't really know that that's such a good idea. I think I was 28 when he addressed me and it was about writing a memoir, and I felt I felt like people would think, Really, you're 28 and you think you can write a memoir. But some years later, we there was a story about a spin a thon that we did to raise money for Usher Syndrome research because I was a fitness instructor for many years and he saw the article about me in the New York Times, I think the Style section, and approached me again and said, Now, would you be willing? So I think what was most important about writing this book for me is that in my own process of coming to terms with a condition that causes progressive deaf blindness, I read so many other people's memoirs and people who had very different life experiences than I did, but I always found that there was something in their writing or their experience that resonated with me.
Rebecca: [00:07:19] And to my knowledge, there was nobody that had written a book about living with Usher syndrome in a personal way that wasn't a clinical book. And so it was very cathartic to be able to write this and to sort of speak my truth and to sit down and really put everything into one place. It was definitely a very therapeutic experience, so I am glad that I did it.
Carrie: [00:07:45] Well, I am glad to. And I just wanted to share. When I was reading your book, I made me think of a quote that Brene’ Brown has, and she said, One day you will tell your story of how you overcame what you went through and it will be someone else's survival guide. So when I think when I read your book, I'm like someone else, you know, is going to read that and be able to have that as a survival guide. So all of your courageous remarks and being able to share personally, I think will help others along the way with that. Would you mind sharing a little bit about your childhood events that led up to the diagnosis?
Rebecca: [00:08:27] Yeah. So, you know, everybody has somewhat of a different process of being diagnosed with Usher syndrome. Now, these days, genetic testing can really detect Usher syndrome before there's any physical presentation. But when I was growing up, they didn't yet genetically test for it. And not only that, it was something that for us, we thought that I had some cookie bite of hearing loss because of frequent ear infections. There was just a lot of information and things that were happening that we didn't pick up on. And so it was really kind of like an experiential thing. And by the time I got to the sixth grade, I was having difficulty seeing the blackboard at school and I thought I needed glasses. And my dad took me to the doctor, to an optometrist. His equipment wasn't sophisticated enough to identify what he saw in the back of my eye. So he sent us to an ophthalmologist and we went to several in the Bay Area in California, and they all confirmed that I had retinitis pigmentosa or RP, which is what causes tunnel vision and blindness. And so initially for people who are early in the onset of RP, they experience night blindness and difficulty in certain parts of their vision, whether it's directly below them or in their periphery. And so as a 12 year old, when I was diagnosed with RP, what we thought was just RP at the time, basically I knew that if I went into a movie theater, I had to grab someone's arm.
Rebecca: [00:10:09] I knew that if the dogs were below me that I might trip over them or the dishwasher was open. But at that time I think I heard the word blindness. But for a 12 year old, it's really difficult for you to wrap your head around what that even means. So it wasn't until I was at the University of Michigan, I was a sophomore, and I woke up one morning with really loud ringing tinnitus in my ears and it didn't go away. After a couple of weeks. So I went and was evaluated by an Otolaryngologist and they said, Rebecca, you don't just have RP You have something called Usher syndrome. We've never seen it as it presents itself in you. But because you have both progressive vision and hearing loss, it can't be anything else. So when I was first diagnosed. Usher syndrome. Type three didn't even exist. It hadn't yet even been identified. And it was my own family's bloodwork that we sent to these researchers in Helsinki, Finland. We were the missing link to being able to identify this third type of Usher syndrome. So yeah, I think that a lot of the work and the experiences I had are what have led to a lot more information for families who have been diagnosed with Usher Syndrome Type III. Because when I was growing up, I'm 43 years old, it wasn't that long ago we didn't have any of the information that we do now.
Carrie: [00:11:40] Right. Wow. And then I know you mentioned that you have the hearing loss as well. When did you first notice that you noticed the vision around 12 and then the hearing loss when.
Rebecca: [00:11:55] So, you know, the the the the actual timeline and my memory are a little off. So I'll do my best to try to remember. But my mom is probably still the best one to account for this. But when I was younger, we would watch television and I would always watch out of the side of my left eye. And so we thought it was just kind of a quirk that I would watch TV with my head cocked sideways and nobody really understood why. We just thought it was a funny tic that I had. And what we came to find out over the years is that my left ear was always my stronger ear. And so I created this coping strategy, this compensation, by caulking  my left ear forward so that I would be able to hear the TV better. And it took us some time to figure that out. Again, I had some hearing loss with what an audiologist called a cookie bite of hearing loss when I was younger. And so we didn't know that there was any connection between the two. We thought that that was likely why? So I was given hearing aids. Even when I think I was in middle school or high school, I definitely had a hearing aid that I wore in high school in one ear for my AP history class because my teacher mumbled. But I remember the first time I was given hearing aids, which I never wore. I remember putting them in and hearing the fibers of the rug below me and feeling like I was hearing way too much. Like there are things that I didn't want to hear. And I think that there was also this aspect of feeling very self conscious of not wanting to have to wear hearing aids or to have a hearing loss. So it was this gradual period of time where I think Usher syndrome may be between my parents or something had been maybe mentioned, but never really discussed in full until I went to the otolaryngologist at the University of Michigan and I got that official diagnosis.
Carrie: [00:14:02] And after you got that official diagnosis, when did you feel like you recognized the gravity of what they said to you?
Rebecca: [00:14:15] You know, it's interesting because for so many of us, when you get really what is and remember, I'm a psychotherapist, it is a traumatic diagnosis. And it's not something even at 19 that I could really wrap my head around. So I was told that I was going deaf and blind. What does that even look like? I mean, the only person that I knew who was deaf blind was Helen Keller. And that wasn't my life. That wasn't how I was raised. I was raised in a hearing sighted family. And so it happened to be close to it must have been about 20 maybe, but it happened to be around the time that like the year before I before I turned 21. And so in my mind, I thought after I got this diagnosis, if I could make myself as physically perfect and academically perfect as possible, nobody would know that there was anything wrong with me. So I developed somewhat of a maladaptive coping strategy or developed an eating disorder because here I was given this megabyte of information that I couldn't wrap my head around. It was something that was completely out of my control. Not only do I have this, but we've never seen it as it presents itself in you. So we can't tell you what your progression is going to be like. We can't tell you how this is going to play out. But all I know is that I felt very out of control, whether I was able to recognize it or not. And so I created or came up with some superficial way of feeling like I had some sense of control in my life. And that was by being hyper focused on how much I exercised and how much I ate and how much I studied, the things that I felt were really tangible that I could somehow count or measure in some way.
Carrie: [00:16:02] Wow. And did that have a, I don't know, help you decide what you were going to go into at that point in time? Did you know you wanted to be a psychotherapist or did that evolve?
Rebecca: [00:16:19] Yeah, it definitely evolved when when I was diagnosed with RP. at 12, it was around the same time that my parents had recently separated, separated and divorced, and they sent me to see a therapist. Now I saw the therapist. My brothers didn't and I don't. I think I knew that it was I didn't really know why I was going. I certainly didn't want to talk about anything. And so but I think that that exposure likely was good for me. And so I think there have been all of these this confluence of different experiences that I've had over my life that have really kind of led me in the direction of being a psychotherapist. When you have a condition like this, it requires you to do a lot of self reflection. It requires you to go inward in a lot of ways that you might otherwise not have to, and to try to figure out what your identity is and who you are. So, yeah, there's a lot of different reasons why I became a psychotherapist, but also with a condition like this, it's important for me to be in a quiet room with one or two or just a small group of people to be able to focus and hear and follow the conversation so well. So it seemed like a good decision for me also in terms of my long term career goals.
Carrie: [00:17:42] Yeah. And in your book, you. Talked about there was I want to read directly what you said in the book because it was about kind of your emotions and challenges. And you talk about how I don't feel like the cards I've been dealt are unfair. I don't think life is that complicated. And I know that pity is a trap that will deplete my self-esteem and take away time that I don't have to waste. I choose instead to be grateful, to be happy with what I have today and to be optimistic about tomorrow. It's a conscious choice that one has to take effort to do. I feel like this can be really hard to do just day to day to have a conscious choice to to make the most of what you have. What do you do to help with that choice every day?
Rebecca: [00:18:38] So I think that what happens is that we feel like we've learned that we're supposed to be pursuing happiness and success and fulfillment and we don't make room or allow for ourselves to feel the emotions that come with being human, whatever it is that we're dealing with. When people say things like, I don't know why God did this to me, or they have all these different feelings around, or trying to wrap their head around how they ended up with the diagnosis, whatever, whatever it may be. In my case, it's Usher syndrome. And I just don't think at that complicated. It's a genetic disorder that I have. I think that people have a very unrealistic view on what life is supposed to look like. And it's not their fault. It's what we've learned through our society and culture and maybe our parents. But I think that the way that I'm able to be as optimistic or present as I am is that I allow myself to feel my emotions. I allow myself to cry. I have days where I don't feel that great, where I feel sort of down, where I feel less hopeful. But it's not because something has totally gone wrong and all of a sudden I've lost my way. It's that that's a part of being human. And I think that we have a lot of intolerance for being uncomfortable or feeling sad or even feeling some feel some depression. And we actually have to allow ourselves to sit with it, to develop tolerance for it, and to try to understand why we may be feeling the way that we're feeling instead of trying to figure out how to get ourselves out of it, because it's only in trying to get yourself out of it that you perpetuate that cycle of feeling unfulfilled and unhappy.
Carrie: [00:20:25] Yeah, I think you're right. A lot of times people get uncomfortable and then as humans, we just want we don't want to bother someone else with how we feel. And like you said, it probably stops you from accepting some of the things about yourself too, if you don't feel them.
Rebecca: [00:20:43] Yeah. Yeah.
Carrie: [00:20:46] Well, actually. Oh, go ahead.
Rebecca: [00:20:49] Well, I also think that sometimes when we feel uncomfortable because we live in this time and place now where we have so many outlets to not have to be present, you can go on any number of different platforms of social media and distract yourself. And what we have a tendency to do when we feel uncomfortable is maybe we shop or we look at what everybody else is doing that we're not, or maybe we drink or we use substances or we binge on activity. We do anything we can do not have to sit with ourselves and feel. And that, I think, is something that's difficult to develop when you have all of these very easy distractions. So yeah, that's a little bit more of my 2 cents on that issue.
Carrie: [00:21:34] Yeah, that's a good viewpoint though, and I like what you said about making that conscious choice and it does take a lot of effort every single day to make that choice to. Another thing that you said, and it was about you coming home from cane training and you sat in your book, you put fact disabilities require help fact I hate help and that the disabilities weren't going to change so I was going to have to. What does that mean to you?
Rebecca: [00:22:09] Yeah. So, you know, I think one of the hardest things for anybody, whether you have a disability or not, is asking for help. And it's not just asking for help. It's recognizing that you need help. And I think that we are raised to develop a sense of independence, to feel like we can do it on our own. We don't need anybody that we raise our children to become as independent as possible. And yet the most productive and successful communities are communities that rely on interdependence, meaning that we rely on each other to make sure that people are able to get from one place to the next. So we're able to be aware of the things that are going on in our community, that we help each other to be able to live productive lives. And so I think when you have a disability, you feel like a burden. Oftentimes, many people with disabilities, I think this feeling of not wanting to be a burden is pervasive in their lives, and it's important for people with disabilities to also understand that you have a very active and meaningful role in your family and friends lives too, and you need to recognize that. And the other thing is, is that developing the comfort and ability to ask for help is not a way of saying, I can't do it. It's a way of saying, I want to do this, but I need help in achieving this goal. And I think that what we forget is that when you ask someone for help, you're not saying, Will you do this for me? You're engendering in them this feeling for them that they matter and that they're needed. And as humans, I think there is nothing. We want to know more in this life than that we matter and that we're needed. And it's important to think about what you elicit in someone else when you do ask them to help you.
Carrie: [00:24:12] That's great and I do agree. I think people they want to help others. So if you can get past and this is just my perception, too, sometimes it's hard for me to just say, hey, you know, I have I have a hearing loss. So you kind of have that part that you have to get over on your own end of just even sharing and disclosing that information in order to get the help that you need.
Rebecca: [00:24:40] Well, and the interesting thing is, as a psychotherapist, and I think you can appreciate this, is that I sometimes have people come into my office. We're talking about things that they have a lot of shame around or a lot of really deep seated feelings about. And so they speak more softly or they may mumble. They don't want to hear themselves even say these things out loud. And now during the summer, when the air conditioning is on, it's a whole other ballgame of like, you know, I need you not only to speak up, but. So this is it's hard when someone is in this very vulnerable position as someone with a hearing loss, having to say, I know how difficult this is for you to share and I really appreciate your vulnerability. But in order for me to be able to help you, I also need you to speak up. And and so I often will have to say that to people. And more than anything, I don't want them to have to change their tone because I understand how vulnerable they are being in that moment. But if I'm going to be able to help them and really hear them and support them, I can't do that if I didn't hear what they just said.
Carrie: [00:25:51] Which is a great segway into my next question I wanted to ask was in 2013, you got a message that you might qualify for a cochlear implant. What can you share a little bit about that cochlear implant journey?
Rebecca: [00:26:09] Yeah, so I didn't get a message that I might qualify. I got a message that I did qualify. And the reason why I make that distinction is because, again, there was no real trajectory for me of knowing what my hearing loss would be like. And I was very fortunate to be raised with relatively normal hearing so that I could develop speech. But we didn't know. I never thought that I would ever get to a point where my hearing loss would be significant enough that I would need to get a cochlear implant. I went through so many hearing aids, I can't even begin to remember all the different ones that I had. And I got to a point where I had different hearing aids for different environments. And so I think you know very well what that experience is like. But so when I found out that I was a candidate, I'd been tested before, and a lot of my decision to get tested was mostly to have my friends get off my back of like, see, I'm not a candidate. And when I found out I was it turns out that the threshold had been lowered in terms of what insurance would cover. But my right ear, which was always my non-dominant ear, it could pick up environmental sounds, but it could never really discriminate. It was more decorative. I could wear earrings on my right ear, but I never really used it. I never used it for the phone. Nobody ever sat or walked on my right side. So that ear became a candidate. I think I had, let's say, with a hearing aid. I think I had 28% discrimination.
Rebecca: [00:27:45] And without a hearing aid in the sound booth, I had 26% discrimination. So the hearing aid was doing very little to help me. And so a lot of people find out they're a candidate and they mull over it and they think about it and they worry about it. And I wanted to be proactive. I really was able to recognize that my hearing loss and having a microphone that I would use at times in noisy environments was exhausting. And I don't think that we realize how exhausting it is. Sometimes when you live with a hearing loss and you don't do the things that are necessary to help improve the quality of your life. And so it was a huge fear of mine, and I allowed myself to mourn and cry before I had that surgery because it was never a place I ever imagined I would be. But I will tell you that after having the surgery and a lot of listening therapy later, my my life improved dramatically. And it was the best decision I could have made. And so many people wait, I think because they're waiting for stem cell research to happen, for your hair growth, to be able to regenerate hearing. And that's a long ways away. I'm encouraged by all of the research that's out there. But in the meantime, your life is really being affected by not being able to hear. So for me, it was the best decision I could have made. I think about a year later in a sound booth, I was testing between sentences and quiet or noise and words somewhere between like 92 and 98%.
Carrie: [00:29:26] Right?
Rebecca: [00:29:26] And it was dramatic. It was life changing.
Carrie: [00:29:29] I had to go from 28% to 90% in sentences is a big jump. Yeah. Do you remember what it was like when you first got activated?
Rebecca: [00:29:44] Yeah, I have the videos too, but I do. I mean, I knew that it was going to be weird. I'd been prepared. People had told me that it's a process, a journey, and all the things that people tell you, but until you actually experience it firsthand, you can't possibly imagine what it's going to sound like. And I just remember being turned on and I thought that like the tinnitus in my head was like speaking. When someone was speaking, it sounded like this very high pitch. It was confusing. And so but it did it took time. I had 16 electrodes, you know, I got Advanced Bionics and going through each of those electrodes, at first you get turned on slowly but surely. But it was a very bizarre experience. And my first instinct was like, Oh my God, what the heck have I done? And I think someone told me that maybe I would feel that way. But again, until you actually experience it. But from the day that I was activated to the next day, even when I went for my second mapping, I noticed that there was a shift and even improvement how quickly my brain was adapting to this new way of hearing.
Carrie: [00:31:02] I would say the same thing. Right. When I got activated, I was like, What the heck did I just do? I felt like I was hearing beeps and chirps and whistles, and that was about it. And I thought my my hearing aid was like squealing or something, But it was actually the beeps that were I was hearing with the cochlear implant.
Rebecca: [00:31:23] Right. And that was my experience too, because, you know, we hear all the higher frequencies first. And I remember my best friend was there in the room and the audiologist and their voices sounded exactly the same, like there was no difference between her voice and his voice. And the only way I can describe it and it still doesn't do it justice, is I remember it sounded like this.
Rebecca: [00:31:46] Hi, how are you? What are you going to do today?
Rebecca: [00:31:50] It sounded like a word processor. It sounded very high pitched. It was just it was very overwhelming.
Carrie: [00:31:57] And so then you wore both for a while, your hearing aid and a cochlear implant. And how did you feel? Were you able to integrate both the signals together?
Rebecca: [00:32:09] Yeah, I mean, the hearing aid I wore was a different company then, so Advanced Bionics know they're under Sunnova, which is the same umbrella as Phonak. And I had a Phonak hearing aid, but I'd become so accustomed to using this other hearing aid that I think I was able as much as I possibly could, able to integrate the two. But all of the sudden I started relying on my right ear that I'd never done. I think I was 33 or 34 when I'd been implanted in my first ear on my right side, and everyone had always walked on my left side, sat on my left side. They were used to having to be on my left. And so there was this whole, like migration of everyone having to move to my right side and having to switch that up. And so now it's amazing that I ever even forget or lose sight of the fact that this has not always been the case, that my right ear really was not very usable until I was well into my thirties. And so it's pretty remarkable. Yeah.
Carrie: [00:33:18] That your brain can take that information that hasn't really had much benefit and make sense of it. Yeah. And then you ended up getting a second implant too. How did that happen?
Rebecca: [00:33:30] So my left ear was not a candidate and I tested it every year when I went back for my mapping and my annual mapping and testing, and by 2017, my left ear had become a candidate. And it was something that I knew was going to happen at some point. I tried using my left ear with just a hearing aid and not my cochlear implant. I had friends speak to me and with me reading their lips and also covering their mouths. I really wanted to get a sense of where I thought my hearing was, and it was something I think that there was something that felt more final about getting my second cochlear implant because it was like that last bit of hearing, natural hearing that I had. But again, once I got my second cochlear implant, after three months sentences and quiet, I was at 100%. I mean, I didn't wait to get my ear implanted. I know that now the implants or MRI compatible, my implants are not. But if I'd waited for an MRI compatible cochlear implant, I would have not missed out on some very crucial years of my life, both personally and professionally. So I think that it was the best decision I could have made and to have more of that stereo surround sound. And remember, when you're losing your vision, you do need everything else you can have to help you gather information from your environment. So I didn't write.
Carrie: [00:34:59] Well, I guess it's a blessing. And the fact that there's so much research and advancements in hearing technology in order to give more hearing that for individuals that need it. So and then assistive technology and everything else to.
Rebecca: [00:35:19] Yep. Yeah.
Carrie: [00:35:21] And you also mentioned in your book, too, that as a psychotherapist, you have seen some individuals who are deaf and hard of hearing. Do you think those individuals seek you out because of your own personal journey too or how how did they find you?
Rebecca: [00:35:40] Yes, I do think that for any of us, one of the things that's most difficult for people living with Usher syndrome or living with a hearing loss or whatever it is that we face, it's the wanting to go and see a therapist where you don't have to explain all of the nuances of living with hearing loss or vision loss or cancer, whatever your circumstances might be, to be able to have a therapist who either specializes in whatever it is that you're dealing with or who has firsthand personal experience, can be relieving. It can be very meaningful because there are so many things that you don't have to explain. They get it in a way that somebody else wouldn't. And I think that my own frustration when you're a therapist, it means that you yourself ethically have to be in therapy. I've been in therapy for a gazillion years. It's been one of the best things I could have done and have done for myself because it allows me to practice self care and be self reflective and hold myself accountable instead of projecting my feelings onto everybody else. But it's also been frustrating because there have been many times where I feel like I'm paying someone to listen to me, educate them about living with hearing loss or living with vision loss. And so when you can bypass that step by seeing someone who has that specialty, that expertise or the personal experience, there's nothing like it. It almost feels like a sigh of relief because you can get to the real heart of the issues that you're dealing with and not have to deal with all of the psychoeducation around living with a hearing loss or vision loss.
Carrie: [00:37:28] Yeah. And for individuals who don't have hearing or vision loss, it's really hard to put yourself in those shoes.
Rebecca: [00:37:36] Yeah, Yeah. But there are also people who are fully sighted and fully hearing who seek me out because they see that I'm contending with something or living with something that they feel is something they couldn't ever imagine living with, and that maybe there's more information or insight or self awareness that I have just from dealing with something like this that they could learn from. So it's interesting.
Carrie: [00:38:04] That it is. And they're like a story about a significant challenge that you've had. And how did you overcome that? You have so much grit and determination and your book and what you share, but there's something that really sticks out in your mind.
Rebecca: [00:38:23] So it's interesting because we talk so much about overcoming our fears or overcoming certain obstacles. And I really try to bring it back to encouraging people to live with obstacles, to live with adversity instead of always trying to overcome it. There are definitely goals we need to set to overcome our fears, but the fears may never go away. It may the first six or seven, eight times I use my cane, I cried. And again, as I've said, living in New York City, using a blind person's cane and walking down the street doesn't draw that much attention. It doesn't look that unusual, which is fortunate. But there's the practice of needing to be uncomfortable, of needing to be afraid and still do whatever it is that you feel afraid of on even a daily basis or consistently so that it's not just that you're overcoming that fear, you're able to live with it. Because I think that we all feel like we have to set these goals to overcome our challenges and be able to move on to the next, bigger and better thing. And yet there are a lot of things that we may not be able to overcome that we may have to simply live with. So I think for me, the biggest obstacle that I still face is dealing with the inaccessibility of so many different types of technology and programs of having to constantly educate people about the importance of making information accessible and that it's not a privilege. It's a right for people who have hearing loss or vision loss to be able to have access to the same information that other people who are not hearing impaired or hard of hearing or low vision or blind that they don't even have to think about. So I'd say that that is something stands out to me. Climbing a mountain, swimming from Alcatraz to shore. Those are things that I can totally do, and I have the spirit to really challenge myself. But dealing with these things on a day to day basis is the most exhausting. That's what I think is my biggest obstacle that I challenge myself with every day.
Carrie: [00:40:46] Yeah, I love your comment about living with the adversity and instead of overcoming that and yeah, you also have some very humorous stories too. Do you feel like humor plays a positive role in living with adversity?
Rebecca: [00:41:05] So humor, I think, is at the core of our existence. When you live through so many different either traumatic events or heavy circumstances, it is so important for us to have humility and also to have humor because so many of the things that we face in our lives we don't have control over, and we try so hard to have some semblance of control of certainty. And yet life is very unpredictable and very uncertain no matter how hard we try. And if I were to just allow myself to fall into this hole of going going deaf and blind and how heavy this is, there's tremendous humor that comes with it. There's tremendous humor that comes with dealing with a condition that is so uncomfortable and and yet it's also hysterical. And I've shared many stories, but one of which that I can think of off the top of my head is when I was presenting for the Alexander Graham Bell Foundation, they were giving an award to someone and I was presenting the award when they brought me backstage and it was really loud and really dark and they said, You hold here, we'll come get you when it's your time to come out and we'll we'll guide you onto the stage.
Rebecca: [00:42:31] So it's completely dark and I feel that there's someone next to me. And so I didn't want to be rude. I wanted to engage in conversation I couldn't really hear because of how noisy it was. But I think I was just making small talk. Someone came to pick me up and said, okay, it's time to go on stage. And I put my hand on that person's arm and said, It was nice chatting with you. But when I put my hand on that person's arm, I realized that I had been speaking to a statue the entire time. And, you know, if I were to allow that to really bring me down, I can't believe I was talking to the statue like, it's hilarious, right? I was so caught up in the fact that I didn't want to be rude or offensive to someone that I just started talking to who I what I thought was a person. But it was nobody. It was just a statue. And so there's so many things that happen that are. Or humorous and you have to really allow yourself to laugh.
Carrie: [00:43:27] That is a good one. Talking to the statue, they probably said all nice things back to you.
Rebecca: [00:43:32] Right. It was a riveting conversation.
Carrie: [00:43:36] I love it. Yes. I find humor to be something that's important for me, too, because I do a lot of things very similar to that, where I mishear things or, you know, the things and I say something and I and I'm like, I don't think that was the right thing to say back.
Rebecca: [00:43:56] Right, Right.
Carrie: [00:43:58] But you have to laugh or it will eat you up, right?
Rebecca: [00:44:03] Yeah, definitely.
Carrie: [00:44:06] And the other there's one other kind of question that I thought I would ask would be. I think as humans, we naturally want to be in community with other people and it's just kind of part of who we are. And in your book, you share a lot about different significant people in your life, your family, your friends, coworkers. Have you. How has that been with you? How have people been able to influence and support you?
Rebecca: [00:44:38] It's so important for us to have a community, even if it's a small group of people that you rely on to just laugh with or to cry with or to feel like you can really speak openly with. And so for me, I really, really treasure my friendships, my relationships, because these are the people who know me better than anyone. I have people in my life who have known me way before my diagnosis, and I have people who I've only more recently met who have only known me with my disability. And so it runs the gamut in terms of the types of relationships that I've curated. But I think part of what's so important about us having community and having people in our lives is that it helps us maintain perspective. And it's also important for us to remember that what we go through may be very acute and specific to our lives, but everybody has something. And there are plenty of fully able bodied, fully sighted, fully hearing people that I work with in my practice. And you could not pay me $1,000,000 to trade places with them for various reasons. Maybe it's because they don't have a strong support system. But you need to be able to foster that yourself, to develop a support system for yourself and to support other people as well. The people who are in your support system that again, that interdependence is so, so crucial to our existence because. We all want to know that we're not alone. And even if somebody can't relate to what you're going through, they can be there with you. And that, I think, is far more important and it makes it more enjoyable and more interesting to have people to be there along the way with you.
Carrie: [00:46:29] Yeah, definitely. Having that village around you is important.
Rebecca: [00:46:34] Huge. Yeah.
Carrie: [00:46:36] Many of the listeners for this podcast are hearing care professionals, their parents who have children, who may be deaf or hard of hearing, or they're adults who are deaf and hard of hearing, and many may be dealing with a new diagnosis or might not have come to acceptance or I don't want to say acceptance, but you know what I mean. Of their hearing challenges. Do you have any takeaways that you can share with the audience about that kind of coming to acceptance or dealing with whatever adversity you have?
Rebecca: [00:47:14] Yeah. you Know, I think that particularly for parents and caregivers of kids or loved ones who have a hearing loss. Oftentimes we do take on this caregiver role, and it's so important for caregivers to recognize that they have needs, too, and that they need to take care of themselves. People who are caregivers by nature feel a sense of fulfillment by helping other people. But when you do that and you don't take time for yourself or recognize your own needs, we have a tendency to develop resentment towards the people we help, and the resentment that we feel is actually not towards the people we are helping or loved ones is actually towards ourselves for not being able to have either the strength or the wherewithal to say, I need to do something for myself or I need to take care of myself. It sort of becomes self-fulfilling. So I think that for parents and caregivers or loved ones, you need to make sure that you're really addressing your needs to that someone, the person with the hearing loss or whatever the situation is, becomes the identified patient. And that is where codependency lies. And so you really need to take care of yourself.
Rebecca: [00:48:28] For clinicians, I think sometimes you work day in and day out on the same issues of dealing with hearing loss, of doing the hearing tests, of fitting people with hearing aids, and having to deal with all of the growing pains of adapting to your new hearing device and everything. And we lose some of our humanity, understandably, because either were exposed to it all the time and it's something that becomes second nature to us. But you have to remember that when a person comes into your office, being able to hear is very much intrinsically linked with our competence and our ability to feel whole. And so we have to remember that people come into you and they actually are very vulnerable. They may be a difficult patient, they may they may cry, they may have any number of different responses to hearing test or being fine tuned, and you have to try to be present for them and understand that this is a very emotional experience. It's not just a clinical experience of of being tuned up. So I think the humanity and maintaining your ability to have compassion is difficult, but so important.
Carrie: [00:49:46] And there's a great take aways for families and also clinicians who are dealing with or, you know, experiencing this professionally on a daily basis, too. Is there anything, Rebecca, that I didn't ask you that you wanted to share today?
Rebecca: [00:50:03] Well, I would love to hear from your audience. I mean, they can certainly reach out to me on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or Twitter at reb_alexander I'm sure you will include that.
Carrie: [00:50:19] I will. I will put that in the show notes for you and for us. And they can get connected with you that way, too.
Rebecca: [00:50:26] Yeah, because I think that there's a lot of questions that may come up for people and I'm happy to answer them. But I think that what's most important for people to know is that they're not alone. You know, we all go through this and it can feel very isolating and lonely, particularly when you're dealing with a hearing loss. And it's so important for people to know that they're not alone, that as difficult as it may be, there are other people who really understand and go through what you go through. And it's not to diminish your experience, but it's to let you know that there are a lot of people out there that you can relate to and develop relationships with who will really be able to see you and understand you. And so I think that's important.
Carrie: [00:51:07] I do, too. And your profession as a psychotherapist and you talked about getting help and when needed to is probably another great point for people.
Rebecca: [00:51:18] Yeah, I think that there's a lot of stigma around seeing a therapist or even potentially taking a patient if you need to. And I think it's important for us to try to break down some of that stigma because the stigma that people feel is actually only inhibiting them. And it's it's important, I think, for people to really recognize not what everybody else thinks or what they think other people will think, but what they need, what is in their own best interest in order to take best care of themselves.
Carrie: [00:51:53] Yeah. Well, Rebecca, I want to thank you so much for being open and willing to be a storyteller of your own life, because I am grateful that I had the opportunity to meet you and connect with you a couple of different times, and that we have a common connection of being deaf and actually going on the cochlear implant journey later on in life as well. But you are definitely an inspiration to me and I know you will be an inspiration to all of our listeners as well. I will link up your social media site as well as the book Not Fade Away, because I feel that you share so much in that book that listeners would really appreciate reading it. So thank you again for being a part of today's podcast.
Rebecca: [00:52:39] Thank you for inviting me. I'm glad to be a part of it.
Carrie: [00:52:42] All right, listeners know if you enjoyed the podcast. Please share this with others. I hope that you engage with me on the Facebook page. Transcripts for this episode are also available on the 3C Digital Media Network website, and thanks for spending time listening today.
Announcer: [00:53:00] This has been a production of the 3C Digital Media Network.