Caitriona Lally is the author of the novels Eggshells and Wunderland. She won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2018 and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction in 2019. She is employed as a cleaner at Trinity College Dublin and is working on her third book.
I've had tinnitus—a constant ringing in my ears—throughout all my knowing life, my inner ear conducting its own private symphonies in the bony amphitheater of my skull. I hear a constant hissing-swishing sound like water dissolving an antacid tablet, a noise that can progress to trilling, beeping, or shrieking as loud as microphone feedback, depending on tiredness or viruses or the whims of the ear gods. These sounds are not just annoying to listen to; they block out the real-world sounds around me. They have been so much a part of me that until I was a teenager, I presumed that everyone had such busy ears.
When I was five, an audiologist came to my school to carry out hearing tests. The beeps and squeaks from the audiometer sounded so like my own ear-clamor that I came to believe that the noises in my ears were in some way linked to this contraption, that wires or rods had been accidentally left in my ears and had burrowed their way inside my head. When I was six, I was scheduled for an operation to fit grommets in my ears, but my parents decided not to risk general anesthesia on such a small brain and canceled the surgery. Instead, I was made to blow balloons to open up my blocked ears: blowing, letting the air out, and blowing again. I'm not sure this achieved anything. I link my early bookishness
