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If it’s all you have ever known, how would you know that something is not normal?

There have been many such incidences like this — surprises, we may say — through the years.

During one particularly humiliating and invasive investigation years ago, a specialist asked me, “Did you never think this was unusual?”

“What would be my reference point?” I asked, which they accepted was a fair response.

Twenty years on, and I discover that I most likely have an auditory processing problem, which explains an awful lot.

Again: did you not think this unusual? Again, what reference point? I cannot experience sound on behalf of anyone else.

How was I to know my experience is atypical? It’s only through reading that I discover that conditions I thought were normal are anything but.

And so here I am, once more, questioning nearly everything: my entire perception of the world and every interaction.

It’s funny: it might so nearly have been picked up in childhood, when my mother took me for a hearing test. But it was missed because auditory processing is not a hearing issue.

We live and learn.