The Frequency | Issue 002

I didn’t just have a story I was telling myself.

I had a whole life I had built.

Alone.

I learned to lip read without being taught. I learned to position myself in every room — always facing the door, always near the front, always watching. I learned to fill in gaps, to nod at the right moments, to laugh when everyone else laughed even when I had no idea what was said.

I built systems. I built strategies. I built an entire way of moving through the world that accounted for every situation where my hearing might fail me.

And it worked.

Not perfectly. But enough.

So when my audiologist — the one who had known me since I was a little girl — referred me for a cochlear implant evaluation, I didn’t feel hope.

I felt like everything I had built was suddenly on the line.

What are you most afraid of losing?

Nobody asked me that in the consult room.

They were kind. They were thorough. They showed me the data and explained the procedure and talked about outcomes.

But nobody asked me what I was really sitting with.

Because what I was sitting with wasn’t fear of surgery.

It was fear of losing the life I had built. The independence. The systems. The identity of someone who figured it out on her own and didn’t need anyone to fix anything.

What if it doesn’t work?

What if what little I have gets taken from me completely?

What if I go through all of this and I’m worse off than before?

Those questions lived in me the whole time. And nobody knew to ask about them. Because nobody in that room had lived what I had lived.

Activation day.

My audiologist turned on my implant.

And I heard my mother’s voice.

The clarity of it had me in tears before I could speak.

I had no idea. I genuinely had no idea what I had been missing.

As I started hearing therapy — learning to hear again, learning to live with my implant — something unexpected happened.

The life I had built? The skills I had spent decades developing out of necessity?

They didn’t become useless.

They transferred.

The discipline of paying close attention. The ability to read a room. The resilience of someone who had been doing hard things quietly for years. All of it became the foundation for learning to hear with my implant.

And that’s why — I believe — I’ve done so well.

Not in spite of everything I built before. Because of it.

Here’s what I need you to hear.

Learning to live with a cochlear implant is hard. I won’t tell you otherwise. It takes time, and therapy, and patience, and more hard days than you expect.

But it is relief.

The only way I can describe what activation felt like is this:

It felt like something had been pushing against my brain my entire life.

And when they turned on my implant, all the pressure was released.

I didn’t even know I was carrying it.

That’s the thing about the life we build around hearing loss. We get so good at it that we forget how much energy it costs. We forget that straining and compensating and filling in gaps — every single day — is exhausting.

And then one day, it stops.

And you realize that everything you built to survive?

It was always preparing you for this.

To the providers reading this.

That candidate sitting across from you is not making a clinical decision.

They’re making a human one.

They’ve built a whole life around their hearing loss. A real life. With real skills and real strategies and a real identity. And they’re sitting in your office wondering if they’re about to lose all of it.

Ask them what they’re afraid of losing.

Don’t rush past the answer. Don’t redirect to outcomes data. Just let them tell you what they’ve built — and then help them see that it won’t be taken from them.

It will carry them.

You already have the clinical excellence.

This is the human part.

To the candidates reading this.

Everything you’ve built to get through — every system, every strategy, every quiet act of resilience — it’s not a liability.

It’s your foundation.

You don’t have to be ready.

You just have to be willing to ask yourself the question.

What am I most afraid of losing?

And then trust that whatever the answer is — you’ve already proven you can carry it.

I promise you. The other side is worth it.

Live Unmuted.

— Megan Goncher
Founder, The Unmuted Life

P.S. — If you’re a CI candidate sitting in the middle of that fear right now, I see you. I was you. I offer 1:1 consultations for candidates who need honest answers from someone who lived it. Book at stan.store/theunmutedlife 🎙️