Sound is Stress: Identity, Silence, and the Echoes of History
Born Between Worlds
I was born completely deaf in one ear and mostly deaf in the other, in the small Gold Rush town of Placerville, California, in 1985. Mom would tell me that my name came from the side of a giant prop baby bottle outside the hospital doors on the way to delivery. Before I could form memories, before I could understand the world I’d been born into, I was already being shaped by what I couldn’t hear.
Sometime within the first year, my biological father left. Mom noticed something else, too: I wouldn’t respond to the loud clang of pots and pans when she put away the dishes. She promptly got my hearing tested and learned everything she could to help me. By the age of three, I was fitted with hearing aids—my first prosthetic bridge between the world of sound and the silence that was more naturally mine.
One of my earliest memories is being in an outpatient room, treated for a very minor cleft palate. By 1989, I was in the Special Olympics—not for hearing impairment, but for a foot problem. From the very beginning, I was being sorted into categories. Special. Different. Requiring accommodation. Labels applied before I had any say in who I was.
Two Worlds, One Life
There are two distinct worlds in which a hard-of-hearing person lives: one with the Deaf and one with the Hearing. Up until my early 30s, I always wanted to be considered normal in the hearing world. I didn’t yet understand the cost of that wanting.
I stood out among my hearing peers not just because of my disability, but because I grew up in Cameron Park—a community where the census measured roughly 80% White, with a median household income around $100,000. Any difference in appearance or ability was magnified. I wore BiCROS hearing aids—bulky, visible, marking me as other. I was mandated into “special” programs, pulled from regular classrooms for enhanced assistance. I could request teacher aides or to sit at the front of the room. Every accommodation was a reminder: you are not like them.
Sports became my refuge. Baseball, especially, provided structure and equity that the classroom couldn’t. On the field, what mattered was whether you could hit, whether you could catch. The ball didn’t care if you could hear it coming. For a few hours at a time, the playing field was genuinely level—no hearing aids required, no special accommodations, just the clean geometry of a diamond and the universal language of competition.
Around that time, I also attended Deaf Camp. My parents viewed it as a place where I could socialize with Deaf kids and learn American Sign Language. The difference in diversity was enlightening and fascinating—unlike anything in my 90% White hometown. But more than the diversity, it was the ease of communication that struck me. The ability to understand others in a group setting was night and day. In the hearing world, I was constantly straining, filling in gaps, pretending to follow conversations I’d lost. At Deaf Camp, I could just… be. The relief was physical—a tension I didn’t know I carried finally loosening in my shoulders, my jaw, my chest.
I talked about it all year long. I waited for the notice in the mail that I’d been accepted for the following summer.
At camp, I learned that most of the other campers attended California School for the Deaf in Fremont. They had dorms. They lived together most of the week, surrounded by peers who understood. It sounded like a place I could belong.
I asked my parents if I could attend.
For reasons I still don’t fully understand, I did not go.
It was becoming clear: I was being prepared for the hearing world, whether I wanted it or not. The decision had been made for me, as so many decisions about disabled children are made—by well-meaning people who cannot see the world from behind the child’s eyes.
At Deaf Camp, I was accepted—but not completely. I discovered something that would stay with me: disability is bigger than race. The diversity at camp was unlike anything in Cameron Park. But I still existed in a space between worlds—not fully hearing, not fully Deaf. Not quite belonging to either. It was my first taste of a feeling that would define the next three decades.
The Sounds You Can’t Parse
Home was not quiet, even though quiet was what I craved. There were loud verbal conflicts. My parents divorced when I was young. The house was full of sounds I couldn’t always parse—raised voices, slammed doors, the kind of ambient tension that a hearing child processes differently than I did. I knew something was wrong by the way people moved, by the looks on their faces. But the words themselves came to me fragmented, like a radio tuned just off the station. I became a student of body language out of necessity, reading the room because I couldn’t reliably read the words.
When I was in fifth grade, my best friend James Phone was killed in a car accident. James was also hard-of-hearing. He was one of the few people who understood what it was like to navigate both worlds, who could teach me the small adaptive strategies that no teacher or therapist knew—the tilt of the head to catch a word, the way to position yourself in a group so you could see the most faces, the quiet solidarity of shared experience. His death left a wound I couldn’t name and a gap I couldn’t fill. I lost not just a friend, but a translator between my two selves.
After that, I pulled away. I stopped attending Deaf Camp around seventh grade. I transitioned to full-time non-”special” programs. I insisted I would be treated as a normal student without any assistance. I didn’t want accommodations. I didn’t want to be different. I wanted to disappear into the hearing world and pretend I belonged there. It was a kind of self-erasure that felt, at the time, like survival.
I struggled academically and at home through middle school and early high school. The second divorce came during this time. In the summer of 2000, I played Gran Turismo 2 constantly—a racing video game that let me tune out everything. Looking back, it was probably the first sign of escapist tendencies. I found something that numbed the noise, and I leaned into it. The irony wasn’t lost on me later: a deaf kid using a screen to escape from sound.
In eighth grade, I welcomed the only Black kid in our class. I didn’t think much of it at the time—I was just being friendly. But I would think about that moment later, when I started to understand what it meant to be visibly different in a place that expected sameness. I had some idea of what he was walking into. I had my own version of it.
Wealth, Race, and the Edge of the Bubble
High school revealed new divisions. I went from Cameron Park to El Dorado Hills—one of the wealthiest communities in the Sacramento region, with median household incomes over $150,000 and even less diversity than where I grew up. The wealth disparity between my middle school and high school was stark. Kids drove BMWs. Families took European vacations. I was navigating a different kind of gap now—not just between Deaf and hearing, but between classes. The hearing world I’d been prepared for turned out to have layers I hadn’t anticipated.
That same year, I visited my biological father in Spring Hill, Florida for two weeks—a working-class suburb north of Tampa, near Brooksville. It was the first time I spent any real time with the man who had left within my first year of life. But what struck me wasn’t just the complicated emotions of that reunion. It was the place itself.
Spring Hill felt poor. And it felt racist. There was a tension in the air—something you could feel in the way people looked at each other, in the conversations that stopped when certain people walked in. I hated it. It made my skin crawl in a way I couldn’t fully articulate at the time. I felt it later in Atlanta. In Memphis. Cities with deep civil rights history, where the segregation wasn’t written into law anymore but was still written into everything else—the neighborhoods, the way people moved around each other, the undercurrents of who was welcome where.
It was a sudden realization: life happens after school. There was a whole world out there beyond the wealthy white foothills of El Dorado County, and I had no idea how to prepare for it. The California bubble didn’t prepare me for how overt racial tension could feel in parts of the South. It barely prepared me for California.
A sports injury ended any fantasy of becoming a professional athlete. I also learned I couldn’t join the military—my hearing disqualified me. Doors were closing before I knew they existed. The hearing world I had fought so hard to join kept finding new ways to remind me I didn’t fully belong in it.
During this time, I started learning the weight of labels. Hearing impaired. Hard-of-hearing. Hearing. Deaf. The words weren’t interchangeable. Each carried its own politics, its own community, its own claim on identity. I didn’t know which one was mine. I only knew that other people seemed very certain about which one I should use.
September 11th and the Architecture of “Us Versus Them”
Then came September 11th.
My brother signed up to be a Marine the day he turned 18, while still in high school. He was sent to Iraq for the invasion. He can’t talk about it. We knew friends from high school who were killed—fine men with bright futures, gone. The weight of that loss was communal, carried in the hallways and at kitchen tables and in the long pauses that followed certain questions.
I couldn’t join. My hearing disqualified me. I watched the rhetoric escalate. Suddenly everyone was talking about “us” and “them”—who was American, who was a threat, who belonged. I watched people I knew choose sides. I didn’t understand yet how much that pattern would come to define my life. But something about it felt familiar. I had been sorted into categories before. I knew what it felt like to be on the wrong side of a line someone else had drawn.
Years later, a different kind of division emerged. During the Obamacare debate, I attended a local congressional town hall. I watched neighbors I’d known for years become unrecognizable, their fear transformed into something uglier. And then I saw something I’ll never forget: a Black man holding a sign depicting Obama with a Hitler mustache.
I stood there trying to process it. The cognitive dissonance. The manipulation that convinces people to carry weapons against their own interests. The same “us versus them” energy, redirected and weaponized. The debates over the Affordable Care Act weren’t really about healthcare policy. They were about who deserved care. Who belonged. Who was really American. The question underneath every policy argument was always the same question: Are you one of us, or one of them?
The rhetoric didn’t start with one administration or end with another. It was a pattern. It kept repeating. And each time it repeated, it got a little louder, a little more brazen, a little harder to ignore—even for someone who had spent his whole life trying not to hear.
Searching for Something Real
College was conflicted. I moved to Davis—a progressive college town, far more diverse than anywhere I’d lived. For the first time, I wasn’t surrounded by an overwhelming white majority. I studied political science at UC Davis. The coursework taught me about corruption, elections, war, terrorism, genocides—long readings about selfish people making lives worse. I thought about becoming a lawyer, then realized there was a difference between being a lawyer and being a successful lawyer—one that had everything to do with connections, presentation, hearing what wasn’t said. In the hearing world, so much depends on what happens in the margins of conversation: the aside, the whisper, the comment made as people walk away. I missed all of it.
But I wanted to help others. I questioned whether I was building toward something real or just following a script someone else had written—the same way I’d followed the script of being “hearing” my whole life.
I graduated from UC Davis in 2007 and took my first post-college job with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. It was there I saw the machinery of incarceration up close—the racial disparities, the systemic failures, the way certain communities were fed into a system that seemed designed to keep them there. The statistics I’d studied in political science became faces. Became stories. Became something I couldn’t unsee. The “us versus them” framework wasn’t abstract theory anymore. It was built into the architecture—literally, in the walls and fences and guard towers, and figuratively, in the policies that determined who ended up inside them.
Years later, I visited New Orleans. In a museum, I found an exhibit documenting racial injustice in the prison and law enforcement system through the decades. It was incredibly moving—not because it taught me something new, but because it validated what I had already lived. The exhibit traced the same patterns I had witnessed firsthand at CDCR. The legacy of slavery transformed into convict leasing, into Jim Crow, into mass incarceration. A through-line of control dressed up as justice. History doesn’t repeat, they say, but it rhymes—and if you’ve spent your life learning to listen carefully, you hear the rhymes everywhere.
At Apple, I met Afghan and Iraqi refugees who had served as interpreters for American forces. They came to America fearing for their lives and the safety of their families. I heard stories of Christian persecution, of midnight escapes, of leaving everything behind. These were people who had risked everything to help us, and in return, they were rewarded with bureaucratic limbo and suspicious glances. I was humbled in a way that textbooks never could accomplish. Their stories stayed with me—another variation on the theme of living between worlds, of belonging to two places and neither at the same time.
At the California Earthquake Authority, I was part of diversity, equity, and inclusion work that forced me to confront uncomfortable truths. I learned about redlining—how the federal government drew maps in the 1930s that determined which neighborhoods got investment and which were left to decay, how those decisions still shape wealth and opportunity today. I learned to sit with discomfort instead of looking away. I learned to ask questions—real questions, not rhetorical ones—to close friends who could help me understand what I hadn’t lived.
I moved through careers—corrections, tech, public service—searching for something that fit. Each job taught me something. None of them felt like home.
The Performance of Normalcy
Dating brought its own questions. “Who’s the complement to me?” I asked myself. And then, without examining it: I am hearing, therefore I should date a hearing woman. I set expectations based on a version of myself that wasn’t fully true. I was patient. I performed normalcy. I didn’t question why. The script said: find someone in the hearing world, build a hearing life, have hearing children. I followed it the way you follow directions in a language you only half understand—confidently enough to fool others, uncertainly enough to fool yourself.
Then came turbulence. Then hitting bottom. The details belong to another essay, but the shape of the story is familiar: I found myself in a place where the life I’d constructed no longer worked. The performance of being “normal” had exhausted me. You can only sustain a translation effort that intense for so long before the translator breaks down.
Sound is Stress
Marriage: “I do.”
The challenges of being married became clear almost immediately. Marriage requires constant communication, and communication was exactly what I struggled with most. My partner believed—still believes—that technology and hearing aids are the solution. That when I miss something, I’m selectively listening. That when she’s not facing me, talking to the wall, it’s my fault for not hearing her through the back of her head.
We did not learn Sign Language together.
It took me years to understand what was happening. I was trying to live as a hearing person in my most intimate relationship, and it was failing. The same performance I’d been giving since childhood—I’m fine, I heard that, say again?—was corroding the one relationship that most demanded honesty. I challenged my identity more effectively by stepping back from the escapes—by stripping them away and looking at what remained.
What remained was this: sound is stress.
Every conversation in the hearing world costs me something. Every meeting, every phone call, every dinner party, every casual exchange at the grocery store—each one requires a level of concentration that hearing people never think about. It’s not that I can’t function. It’s that functioning is exhausting. The hearing world doesn’t just ask me to listen. It asks me to perform listening, constantly, without rest.
I finally found comfort at Purple Communications in Rocklin. For the first time in my professional life, I was surrounded by mostly Deaf colleagues. Visual communication was the norm. The constant strain of auditory comprehension—the lipreading, the guessing, the nodding along to conversations I’d lost—was absent. The silence wasn’t empty. It was full—full of hands moving, faces expressing, meaning being made without a single sound. It was the most communicative environment I’d ever worked in.
My hearing aid broke during my time at Purple. Repairs took months. During that time, my hearing levels dropped further. And I found myself enjoying conversations with my Deaf coworkers more than struggling through inefficient communication at home.
It was then I realized: I am deaf.
Not hard-of-hearing. Not hearing impaired. Without modern tools—without the technology my wife believes should fix everything—my life would be completely different. I would be deaf. I am deaf. I just happen to live, work, and socialize in the hearing world. The label I’d been running from my entire life was the one that finally fit.
What Children Teach You
Having kids changed everything.
Music—something I’d always had a complicated relationship with—became different when I experienced it through my children. I watched them respond to sounds I couldn’t hear. I wondered what they perceived that I missed. I wondered what they might inherit. Every parent worries about what they’ll pass down. I worried about silence.
In 2018, we lost Parker in the third trimester. Grief is its own kind of silence—the kind that has nothing to do with hearing. There are no words for it, no signs, no accommodations that help. You just carry it. Some losses are beyond the reach of any language, spoken or signed.
And then: identity, rearranged. I have mixed-race children now. I am confronting my own White privilege in ways I never had to before—because suddenly it wasn’t abstract. It was my kid. It was the world my kid would inherit. It was every “us versus them” I’d ever heard, pointed at someone I loved. The division I’d studied in textbooks and witnessed at town halls and felt in my own body was no longer theoretical. It was personal in the most permanent way possible.
Defying History
Sebastian Haffner was a German journalist who lived through the rise of the Nazi Party. In his memoir Defying Hitler, he wrote:
“It was at this time that, invisibly and unnoticed, the Germans divided into those who later became Nazis and those who would remain non-Nazis.”
The division didn’t happen all at once. It happened through rhetoric. Through small choices. Through the slow erosion of norms that once seemed unshakeable. It happened in living rooms and at dinner tables and in the silences that followed statements that should have been challenged but weren’t.
I know something about division. I’ve lived between worlds my whole life—Deaf and hearing, White community and diverse community, escaping and awake, the hearing world that raised me and the Deaf world where I finally felt at ease. I know what it looks like when a line is drawn and people are asked to stand on one side or the other. I know the cost of standing in between.
When politicians use language that divides—when they call immigrants “invaders,” when they invoke centuries-old laws to disappear people without trial—I recognize it. It’s the same energy that made me want to hide my hearing aids as a child. The same energy that made Deaf Camp feel like freedom and my hometown feel like performance. The same energy that tells anyone who is different: you don’t belong here. It is the sound of a world narrowing, of doors closing, of categories being drawn tighter and tighter until there’s no room left for anyone who doesn’t fit neatly inside.
When Warnings Come True
In September 2023, the Sacramento Bee published my essay about living between the Deaf and hearing worlds. A year later, in December 2024, I started writing about something else that worried me: the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
This law, part of the Alien and Sedition Acts under President John Adams, allowed the government to detain or deport citizens of foreign nations deemed threats during wartime.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act through presidential proclamations to authorize the arrest and detention of non-citizen Japanese, German, and Italian nationals. Separately, Executive Order 9066 — a distinct legal authority — authorized the mass removal of all persons, citizens included, from designated military zones. Over 120,000 people—most of them American citizens—were forced into camps. Both programs are now universally condemned as among the greatest civil rights violations in American history.
I wrote: “Reviving such laws today risks repeating these dark chapters.”
That piece sat in my drafts folder for three months.
Then, in March 2025, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act for the first time since World War II.
Using claims about the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, the administration deported 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador without due process. They were imprisoned indefinitely in CECOT, a notorious maximum-security facility, with no trial dates and no release dates. The administration defied federal court orders to halt the deportations mid-flight. Lawyers, family members, and journalists were denied access.
Federal judges ruled the deportations violated due process. Human Rights Watch documented that more than 200 Venezuelan deportees were subjected to enforced disappearances. Congress appropriated $170 billion for immigration enforcement.
The warning I drafted in December 2024 became reality three months later. The words I’d hesitated to publish were already history by the time I found the courage. I learned something from that hesitation: silence has its own consequences.
The School That Mirrors the Struggle
The story of the California School for the Deaf in Fremont—the school I once asked to attend, the school that represented a world where I might have belonged—mirrors these larger struggles. The school faces constant pressure to mainstream, to reduce resources, to prioritize integration over immersion. But mainstream schools cannot replace what a dedicated Deaf school provides: an environment where Deaf children see themselves reflected, where they build identity and resilience, where they are not constantly performing normalcy for a hearing world that will never fully accept them on their own terms.
The same is true for immigrant communities. For anyone who exists between worlds. For anyone who has been told that assimilation is the price of belonging.
When we reduce resources, when we invoke ancient laws to remove people, when we use “us versus them” rhetoric to divide—we are telling people they don’t belong. That their identity is a problem to be solved. That they should hide who they are. That the only acceptable version of themselves is the one that looks and sounds like everyone else.
I spent decades hiding who I was. I know exactly how much it costs.
Sound is stress. But silence—the silence of not speaking up—is worse.
Between Worlds, Still
I grew up between worlds. My children are growing up between worlds. The question is not whether difference exists—it always will. Difference is not a problem. It is the fundamental condition of being human.
The question is whether we build a society that makes room for it, or one that forces people to choose sides.
The manipulation of fear, the “us versus them” mentality—it erodes everything. It eroded Weimar Germany. It eroded my sense of self for thirty years. It is eroding America now. The pattern is old. The pattern is recognizable. The pattern depends on our silence to succeed.
As I reflect on my role in shaping the world my children will inherit, I ask myself: Will I be a passive observer, or will I work toward something better? Will I let the script be written for me, or will I finally write my own?
The time to act was 2023. The time to act is still now.
The essay about living between the Deaf and hearing worlds was published in the Sacramento Bee, September 2023. The warnings about the Alien Enemies Act were drafted in December 2024—three months before they came true.