Nicolette Toussaint's Song Analysis

When I was much, much younger, my family was pretty much everything my life was about. I was never a terribly social child while I was growing up and going through preschool and elementary school, I mean I had the friends who I met at school that I was friends with and enjoyed at school, but when I went home everything was about my family. I always had my sister, who was my best relatively-close-to-my-age friend for a good while because I had yet to really get to know anyone as well as I knew her, and then there were my parents. I was always super duper close to my parents when I was younger, mainly my mom because I was the youngest and she coddled me so much and it was great and we loved each other very much. I always looked up to my dad
A loss of innocence defogs the shroud of ignorance that surrounds someone who does not know any better than they do about a situation, whether it be in regards to the evils of the world or the reality they simply cannot grasp because they have never really been physically capable of doing so. In Nicolette Toussaint’s “Hearing the Sweetest Song,” she speaks of her experiences as a deaf person and the effects her loss of innocence, the acquisition and use of her own hearing aid, had on her. "I knew I had lost something: not just my hearing, but my independence and my sense of wholeness."(Toussaint). When my parents separated I lost my own sense wholeness. My family, being such a large part of my life, my identity, shaped me into who I was, much like with Nicolette’s deafness. When she got her hearing aid, she was able to realize all that she thought was happened to be not what she thought and it rocked her entire world. My parents’ divorce was the point was that point for me, the point where I realized that my understanding of what reality was happened to be nothing but nonsense and that I had just been blissfully ignorant the entire
I don’t know if I would’ve found the same interests or the same friends, and I’m scared to find out, but with all that I’ve gained from the sum of my experiences I can confidently say that, after everything, my parents divorcing was a good thing for me. It made me into the person I am today. I was scared to begin with because I didn’t know what would happen with me or my family after everything, but things worked out for me in the end. In Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave,” a man who had lived his life imprisoned in a cave manages to escape and the hole he had been struck in his whole life and experience the new realities that faced him in the outside world. “When one was freed from his fetters and compelled to stand up suddenly and turn his head around and walk and to lift up his eyes to the light, and in doing all this felt pain and, because of the dazzle and glitter of the light, was unable to discern the objects whose shadows he formerly saw...” (Plato). Had he not been willing to go out into the light that initially harmed his eyes, he would not have been able to adjust to his new surroundings and realize that that which initially harmed him ended up being a new, beautiful reality for him to walk into. My eye adjustment was my search for a new identity, and had I not been willing to face the new reality and discover myself again, I would have been left behind in my own cave to