near-deaf experience

A play on words, but not emotions...
When you are on the other side of a tragic event, the side where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel and you feel "okay," you can make a choice, to have grown and changed from the experience or still be the thick-headed light-weight you were before it. I can tell you I hope I am the first.
How can you go from being what you were before when everything in your whole life looks and feels different? Easy, it is comfortable... it is normal... it is the easier choice.
I have a constant reminder of my blessings. I take off my implants and settle into that uncomfortable silence every night. In the morning, I add vibrancy to my muted world when I put them back on again. My near-deaf experience is something I live everyday. When I feel frustrated and lazy, I can usually rally myself pretty quickly by slipping off an implant. Or the magnet will slip off as I brush my hair, and I feel like... who turned the lights off?.... So when someone asks me how I am, I should respond..amazing, blessed... but I often what I do say is...it is great...but it will never be like normal hearing.
Not that it isn't true, it is definitely true. I just wonder why I need to tag that on? Do I feel some kind of need to remind them of their blessings? It definitely is not a conscience thing... maybe it is some kind of weird repressed anger I don't even understand or feel? As ordinary as I look and feel, I realize that my life has been anything but...
So, where am I today? In a really good place. Two is much better than one. The question in the back of my mind is ... why one? Why do people get one? Isn't the research conclusive that people can function much more independently with two? I can slip off one now and say... Oh my! The difference is pretty dramatic. I am taking strides everyday to improve my newly implanted side... I can speak on the phone on both sides now, though I still favor and may always favor my right side. I can hear so much that if I wrote a list of all of the things I hear now, that couldn't hear before you would be amazed. My husband's favorite is the awful light jazz they play on the weather channel during the eight day. I definitely couldn't hear anything background like that before, but now I can once again do a little dance of mockery my husband and I used to do/do again when we hear it.
I have some pretty cool things on the horizon. I know that the amount of musicians that are implanted bilaterally like myself are probably a small handful. I am excited that I will be traveling to Seattle in June to participate in a music perception study at the University of Washington. I will also be doing some similar testing through the Cleveland Clinic.
Probably the biggest change is what I am hearing and responding to at school. I have found myself getting pretty wound up and critical of my choir. What a gift! I can tear up every time I do something in all essence I shouldn't be able to do. In what universe does a instrumentalist end up teaching choir, thrive, lose their hearing, still thrive, get implanted and continue to do something that most people with normal hearing couldn't do? Like seriously, who am I?