Every tinnitus patient embarks on a hero’s journey which, as Joseph Campbell reminds us, consists of three phases.  The first phase is the call to an adventure, involving the hero’s separation from the routine of everyday life.  Next is the second and longest phase, consisting of a series of challenges that both call upon his native abilities as well as develop even greater strengths and skills. Finally, having survived these tests, the hero returns to everyday but altered, armed with a wisdom that he shares with others. Granted, this is an idealized version of our tinnitus journey, and most of the time it feels like there is nothing heroic about our struggles. But we are all a bit of a hero in this process of coming to terms with tinnitus, and our efforts in this arena ought to be informed and inspired by this truth.

Let’s then start at the beginning. As Campbell notes, the hero’s journey can begin rather ingloriously, with our protagonist not actively embracing the call to adventure but consciously avoiding it so that he in fact goes kicking and screaming into the action. This is certainly the case with one hero was shaped by Campbell. When George Lucas was writing Star Wars, he picked up Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and has admitted the influence that Campbell’s model of the hero had upon his script. Luke Skywalker, recall, only agrees to join the rebels when he learns that the aunt and uncle who raised him have been killed by forces from the Empire. This reluctance is as well a feature of the tinnitus patient, since who would voluntarily agree to be ejected from a world of accessible silence and tossed into a cacophonous realm of harsh and unending noise. For the tinnitus patient however, unlike the hero, there is no turning back, no possibility of refusing the call to adventure since the call is nothing other than life with tinnitus (well, there is one possibility, but for the time being we will not consider it).

But if life mandates that we move forward, we must nevertheless admit the pull in the opposite direction is powerful. Here I am speaking of the all-too-human desire to find someone or something to blame for our tinnitus. At this point, we have entered into the second state of the hero’s journey Initiation. As Campbell describes it, “once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape…where he must survive a succession of trials.” The urge to uncover the cause of one’s condition is the first of the tinnitus trials. It is imperative we respond successfully/properly to this initial challenge, for failure to do so imperils future progress. So what is the correct response?

Tinnitus patients are all over the map when it comes to the issue of the cause of their condition. Some can pinpoint a specific event they can link to the onset of their tinnitus with a high degree of certainty—it developed after taking a medication or immediately following exposure to a loud sound. For others, the source of their tinnitus is a complete mystery. Their tinnitus sprang forth as unexpectedly as Athena from the head of Zeus. The vast majority of cases, like my own, fall somewhere in between. Invariably, the tinnitus sufferer can point to some factors they believe played a role—wearing headphones for an extended time or a period of extreme stress—but they cannot link the onset of symptoms to any specific event. Even if they could, coincidence is not causality; a hundred people could have been exposed to precisely the same factors and not have developed tinnitus. An entire range of emotions can arise in the search for cause, from the fury of anger to the abyss of uncertainty to the sting of self-loathing. The fact is, nothing good happens from pursuing this line of inquiry. It is at best a distraction and a worst an energy pit, a psychic black hole, draining the resources we will require for the true challenge that lies ahead.  Indeed, the danger of looking back is well-illustrated by the fate of Lot’s wife and the wisdom of Satchel Page. Hence, the hero of the tinnitus journey confronts this challenge by ignoring it.