I’ve been busy this month helping my mom organize the boxes of photographs and old documents at her house. The best part of this project? When I come across documents from my childhood that I’ve long forgotten about, but thanks to my mom, have been carefully preserved.

When I was 12, my English assignment was to write an autobiography of my life (so far) and make a diorama of some of my favourite hobbies. I misunderstood the assignment and ended up writing a biography–and forgot to make the diorama! This is one of the earliest expression of me ever sharing what it was like for me to get sick, to lose my hearing, and learn to navigate in a world while feeling ignored. I suppose this should rightly be part of the “Green Light” series, but oh well. Here are some extracts from the assignment.

Jaipreet lived a healthy life, till at the age of 4 1/2, on November 16, 1986, the day she got sick…

For the most part, Jaipreet was a healthy child, She had her share of colds and flus…But only one time the flu was serious…Of course everyone knows what having the flu’s like; feeling hot, throwing up, having high fevers…Jaipreet’s parents took her to the doctor. He checked her, and then told them to bring her back. They took Jaipreet back, hoping there would be good news. But, the doctor told Jaipreet’s parents that she had bacterial menengitis [sic], which was a disease that had something to do with the brain and spinal cord, and she had to be placed in Murbarank Hospital [in Kuwait] and had to be treated by anti-biotics (medicine) for two weeks. Some people died from menengitis [sic]. But, luckily, Jaipreet survived. But during the treatment, it did something to Jaipreet’s hearing that made her lose it.

Being in the hospital made Jaipreet the center of attention. Gifts and flowers came to her from her mother’s family. Visitors came to visit the child who sat on a hospital bed without hearing. Some nights, Jaipreet’s mother or father would sit in her hospital room to keep her company till she went to sleep.

After she was released from the hospital on the first week of October, Jaipreet’s parents did everything to make her better. They took her to doctors, hoping they would have something to help her hear better. One of these doctor [sic] gave her a [sic] instrument similar to phonic ears. To Jaipreet, they didn’t work very well. She had a hard time hearing with them.

When Jaipreet and her family moved to Canada, in 1988, Jaipreet got new hearing aids. After not being able to hear any sound [sic] for a long time, at last there was something that made her hear all the wonderful sounds around her.

Wearing hearing aids really helped her. Jaipreet could hear better with them than without them.

Following that paragraph, there’s a short section titled “Jaipreet on Sounds:”

Hearing aids are wonderful. They help me hearing better. Those kids, who need them, but don’t want them, don’t know what they’re missing. It’s be able to hear sounds, voices and music, and a lot of other things.

When you’re deaf, you can’t hear. Very loud sounds; you can hear. You can’t just forget silence. It has too much pressure. For example, you see people talking, but you can’t hear them, because you can’t hear. You just feel you want to shout, ‘Would you just speak up?’ You want to hear things, to be able to understand. That’s what hearing aids for the deaf are for. o hear, to not miss out any sound. To be able to understand.

None of the other deaf or hard-of-children I went to school with knew sign language, other than the alphabet, which we used as a secret code to spell out our names or pass notes in class. Our world was a world of sounds. Silence was pressure. All we ever wanted to be was understood.