I’ve spent at least ten years telling people I can’t hear without my glasses on. I can’t see with them either, but that’s a different problem. With progressive lenses, I’d twist my neck into origami shapes just trying to see my desk, my monitor, and whatever crisis was unfolding on paper. Eventually I ditched the glasses and enlarged the screen. Problem solved.

Except then people would walk into my office while my glasses were either on top of my head, buried under CAD drawings, or balanced on a pile of pens and regrets. I’d throw up my hand like a traffic cop and say, “Stop. Don’t talk. I can’t hear without my glasses.” Everyone laughed. I thought it was a joke. Turns out it wasn’t.

Fast forward to this year. Someone in my household discovered a Roku channel that plays Xena: Warrior Princess 24/7. All six seasons. All 134 episodes. Over and over.

The average episode is 44 minutes — so that’s 5,896 minutes or 98.3 hours. About four days and two hours for one full cycle.

Which means that since July, assuming a one-hour runtime with commercials, the entire series has been through my living room roughly twenty-two times.

I can walk in, see five seconds, and immediately say, “Ah, Titans again,” while someone nearby insists I can watch whatever I want. And I could. But honestly, the looping Xena marathon is working for me.

Because somewhere between July and today, I learned I’m not crazy — I really couldn’t hear without my glasses.

My ENT (former NFL running back Dr. Sam Gado, which is objectively very cool — I have his trading card) put tubes in my ears. Suddenly everything sounded wrong. Muffled. Off. I panicked. The audiologist tested me and confirmed it: measurable moderate to severe hearing loss. I’d been lip-reading for years. I just didn’t know it. COVID masks nearly broke me.

“Sometimes the kindest thing you can give yourself is the space to hear your own thoughts — glasses, hearing aids, Xena reruns and all.”

Now I have hearing aids. They are tiny miracles.

Did you know your own jeans make noise? Your hair makes noise? Scratching your head is basically a percussion solo?

The aids even have an app with different modes — one for noisy rooms, one for playing in the band, and best of all… mute.

And that’s how Xena fits into this.

As long as she’s out there fighting gods and warlords for the twenty-third time in the background, I can tap “mute” on my hearing aid app, sit down, and write. It’s my own small kindness to myself — a pocket of quiet carved out of a noisy world.

So yes, I still wander around asking, “Where are my glasses?” But now I know the truth: sometimes the kindest thing you can give yourself is the space to hear your own thoughts — glasses, hearing aids, Xena reruns and all.

Thank goodness it isn’t the Stargate channel on endless replay…