I’ve written before about how, after the birth of my son, I became critically ill, and was in a medical coma in the hospital for two months, and sick for a year. No one expected me to live, but thanks to highly wonky medicines, I did.

But there was a cost to taking those meds. I lost my hair. (No big deal. it grew back better and curlier than ever.) And, I lost much of my hearing. That was a big deal. One that tormented me for years. I didn’t want to get hearing devices because, to me, there was a horrible stigma. People who wore hearing aids were doddering. They didn’t listen, they said, "what, what," over and over. Worse, the hearing aid would make this squealing sound. I worried that it was the beginning of the end of me.

World Hearing Day is today, March 3, led globally by the World Health Organization; I am so jazzed to have been appointed the American Ambassador by GN, a global hearing company based in Denmark, which has commissioned research on destigmatizing the use of hearing instruments. To coincide with this day, GN Global is sharing free images (see Unsplash for GN Hearing Global) featuring real people living with hearing loss—a tattooed musician, a young punk woman, a financial wizard in a three-piece suit and spit-shined wingtips. Every walk of life, every kind of person is represented here, all meant to give people who wear hearing devices some normalcy.

Everyone knows the stigma about hearing issues. There are always jokes about a hearing person saying, “Want some pie?” And what the hearing-impaired person hears: “There’s a fly.” Recent movies, like "The Sound of Metal," about a musician who loses his hearing, were upsetting because the hard-of-hearing character lost everything: His music, his girlfriend, and he ended up being an outlier, living an uncomfortable, solitary life. Other movies like "A Quiet Place" use a cochlear implant as a plot device. But what I think people need, what I need, are movies that don’t focus on the trials or empowerment, but on the everyday life of a person who happens to wear a hearing device.

Recently, my husband and I saw a 1940s film noir about a detective who was great at his job. I noticed he had a wire coming out of his ear, and when he pulled out what looked like a tiny phone, I knew then it was a 1940s hearing aid! No one mentioned his hearing for the entire movie. Instead, it was normalized, no more important than his fedora hat! We need more everyday representations of people living with hearing loss in the media. Let’s hear it (whoops, forgive the pun) for advertisements and movies where a hearing issue is as much a part of a character as the color of their hair.

I went from deep shame (I told no one I had hearing aids for a long time, and I spent a lot of time worrying that people would find out) to realizing the way to get rid of shame is to expose it. Every time I write an essay about my hearing, I feel stronger. Even better, people reach out to me with questions, some of them still shy with shame, others want the name of my audiologist.

My mom used to tell me how embarrassed she was about wearing glasses, how she hid them, because she didn’t want people calling her Four Eyes or dubbing her Mrs. Magoo, making fun of her. Now there’s a Warby Parker on every street corner just about, and people have four or even more pairs of glasses because they’re fun. After all, it’s normal.

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