What Can You Hear?

Listening and hearing are not the same thing.
Creating What Can You Hear? involved a year-long battle of a lot of listening and hearing paired with desperately trying to understand.
For most of my life, I had tried to shut out the idea of losing my hearing. I knew the time would come when my genes would betray me, and yet I tried to pretend that my fate was not decided. But things started changing. My mom got hearing aids. She and my grandma had to start relying on an app to understand me. In my ears, words became jumbled, and I had to read the lyrics to understand songs. I started to answer the question “Did you hear that?” with “No.” My fate was no longer a silent gene lingering a generation above me- it had descended.
Around the same time, I got the opportunity to make a film. I looked at my Grandmother, and her desperation to connect with her late Mother, to tell her that she was sorry, and that she got it now: what it was like to struggle through every conversation and stare at silent lips, birds, and waves. And so it began: a 4-hour flight followed by a long road trip to reach a symbol of connection in the middle of Oregon.
I had no idea what we’d find at the end of the road, but what I especially didn’t realize was how my journey wouldn’t end when I arrived home. I spent 12 months editing 10 days worth of footage. Every day, I was forced to confront my future, to talk about my hearing loss in ways I had tried to avoid for a decade, and to grapple with what this all meant for me and my family: the emotion, the frustration, the miscommunication. I hustled, I struggled, I cried, and tried to give up. The struggle to complete the movie became just as much a part of the film as the road trip itself. I became more aware of my hearing loss every single day, and more aware of the hidden battles faced by the generations before me. Even while alone in a dark editing room, I connected with my family more and more each day. And as I listened, I began to understand. I began to hope that maybe just one person would see our story and understand something that just months before, I couldn’t understand myself; a constant battle of generational trauma, a struggle with fate, and a yearning for connection that rests inside all of us, hearing or not. Something that I could only see once I accepted the silence I once feared. It became a film I desperately needed to make.
And in the end, I heard better than ever before.