Sound is Stress: Identity, Silence, and the Echoes of History
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.
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.
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.
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 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 nearly 90% 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. His death left a wound I couldn’t name and a gap I couldn’t fill.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 rhetoric didn’t start with one administration or end with another. It was a pattern. It kept repeating.
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.
But I wanted to help others. I questioned whether I was building toward something real or just following a script someone else had written.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And then: identity, rearranged. I have a mixed-race child 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 used it during World War II to justify the internment of Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066. Over 120,000 people—most of them American citizens—were forced into camps. It is now universally condemned as one of 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 at least 137 people were “forcibly disappeared” under the Act. Congress appropriated $170 billion for immigration enforcement.
The warning I drafted in December 2024 became reality three months later.
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.
The same is true for immigrant communities. For anyone who exists between worlds.
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.
I spent decades hiding who I was.
Sound is stress. But silence—the silence of not speaking up—is worse.
I grew up between worlds. My child is growing up between worlds. The question is not whether difference exists—it always will.
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.
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?
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.