Ménière’s Disease, the inner ear disorder diagnosed in about 600,000 Americans, is my constant companion. We’ve been together since my late teens. It’s permanently altered my life, and there is no cure.

Meniere’s Disease, a so-called invisible disorder — because you’d never know I have it simply by looking at me — is unknown by many and understood by few. It’s taken most of the hearing in my right ear, but given me so much: tinnitus in both ears, chronic unsteadiness, and permanent ear fullness. I want to hate it, but I don’t.

A poem seemed like a good choice.

Unquieted

Decades have passed, the sea in my ear,
a tide that never rests, never clears.
What began as a whisper grew into a roar—
the world spinning wildly, floor to the door.

Sound left slowly, like slow fading light,
a candle guttering deep in the night.
Now silence is something I cannot recall—
a ringing horizon, endlessly small.

I used to know quiet—a still, steady space,
where breath was enough, a soft, restful place.
But now there’s a hum where the hush should reside,
a thin silver thread I can never untie.

The world tilts sometimes without asking me,
as if balance itself forgot how to be.
I’ve stumbled through vertigo’s merciless spin,
but found, somehow, a stillness within.

This is my landscape: no silence, no cure,
echoes and motion I’ve learned to endure.
And yet, through the loss, a strange peace has grown—
not in what’s returned, but in what I have known.

The sea in my ear will not let me be,
but I’ve made my home by this shore by this sea.