Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.93 AVERAGE
3.93 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
Thank you, Nin, for your bravery in sharing your struggles with sudden hearing loss and vertigo from a virus! Your transformation from a high-performing STEM management executive to a passionate and uplifting SAHM is admirable. You showed the world the meaning of being able to pivot and continue personal growth in the face of adversity.
"Doctors wanted to conquer diseases at all costs, whereas patients wanted to live their best life possible."
This memoir took us through Nin's sensory loss, grief, adaptation, and resilience to reclaim her identity, with her family's unwavering support. This book is pure honesty in the good and the bad thoughts that permeate through one's mind, navigating chronic illness and monumental life changes. A lot of emotions were felt as a reader! The bike scene especially put me through an array of emotions.
I loved the inclusion of meaningful quotes at the beginning of the chapters and throughout the book and how they shifted as her mindset changed. My favourite was the Business Improvement Department motto: "Efficiency can take you down the wrong path faster."
Thank you, Nin, for sharing a copy of your book with me! ❤️
"Doctors wanted to conquer diseases at all costs, whereas patients wanted to live their best life possible."
This memoir took us through Nin's sensory loss, grief, adaptation, and resilience to reclaim her identity, with her family's unwavering support. This book is pure honesty in the good and the bad thoughts that permeate through one's mind, navigating chronic illness and monumental life changes. A lot of emotions were felt as a reader! The bike scene especially put me through an array of emotions.
I loved the inclusion of meaningful quotes at the beginning of the chapters and throughout the book and how they shifted as her mindset changed. My favourite was the Business Improvement Department motto: "Efficiency can take you down the wrong path faster."
Thank you, Nin, for sharing a copy of your book with me! ❤️
I was given a free ARC of the book in exchange for an voluntary unbiased review.
Nin’s book is a deeply personal account of her sudden hearing loss resulting in single sided deafness with the added challenge of ongoing vertigo.
I experienced the same condition 2 years ago so it was really interesting to read of someone else’s experience and how they navigated their new world. I felt jarred at times of how Nin describes herself as broken and how she speaks of the tragedy of what happened - I don’t consider myself or the situation this way at all. This isn’t to say that either of us are right or wrong, just very different perspectives I think.
I really recommend this book to everyone as it definitely shows that life can change in an instant and that we should have more empathy for others whether we can identify with their situation or not.
I was really happy to get to the end to see that Nin and her family have grown together through this experience and that she has found joy in a more simple life.
Nin’s book is a deeply personal account of her sudden hearing loss resulting in single sided deafness with the added challenge of ongoing vertigo.
I experienced the same condition 2 years ago so it was really interesting to read of someone else’s experience and how they navigated their new world. I felt jarred at times of how Nin describes herself as broken and how she speaks of the tragedy of what happened - I don’t consider myself or the situation this way at all. This isn’t to say that either of us are right or wrong, just very different perspectives I think.
I really recommend this book to everyone as it definitely shows that life can change in an instant and that we should have more empathy for others whether we can identify with their situation or not.
I was really happy to get to the end to see that Nin and her family have grown together through this experience and that she has found joy in a more simple life.
I really thought this would resonate with me more than it did since I also have a chronic illness, but it didn’t. There were also some luke warm takes on mental health that I did not enjoy.
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
As a fellow overachiever who also feels like she didn’t have to struggle much early in life, those aspects of the memoir and reflections related to those characteristics were really relatable. It was a well written memoir with a lot of great insights, but I sometimes found myself getting a bit…bored, maybe?…when the chapters would turn into dense personal philosophy. This is a totally subjective reaction, just like with any other book, but it almost got too optimistic for me. Again—for me. I recognize this is what a lot of people hope to get out of a memoir.
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Nothing in nature lives for itself. Rivers don’t drink their own water. Trees don’t eat their own fruit. Sun doesn’t give heat to itself. Flowers don’t spread fragrance for themselves. - Nin Mok
One day you could be sitting at your computer, in a Zoom meeting for the company you worked 20 years to climb up the ladder of, to all of a sudden be lying in a hospital bed with complete hearing loss in one of your ears causing vertigo so bad your balance is permanently thrown off.
In a life-changing instant your life is silent and to avoid pain and vomiting it also has to be still.
Suddenly Silent and Still by Nin Mok is her life-changing story, how she went from the top to the bottom in an instant and what it took to regain not her old life back because she had to mourn that, but a new one that included vertigo and being completely deaf in one ear.
This book spoke to my soul. I loved every word of it. You don’t need to have suffered the same fate as Nin to relate to her story. We all have some kind of trauma in our lives, some worse than others. But that does not make anyone’s grief or journey any less than the person next to them.
Nin was unforgivingly honest throughout this whole book. Some may not agree with how she processed her emotions, her disability or her life from start to now, but one has to remember this is her story!
I honestly cannot praise this book enough. It is beautifully written. An easy read and gives the reader food for thought.
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
This is a beautifully written memoir. She strung her words together in such a way that I felt like I knew exactly what she was going through. Of course, I can not, but the emotion and inspiring story will definitely stick with me. Thank you for sharing a devastating yet beautiful story!
emotional
inspiring
slow-paced
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
emotional
hopeful
sad
medium-paced
The book is very well-written. The author is a bit of a self-proclaimed overachiever, so it's not surprising that she wrote a book well. I get the feeling that she is the kind to lean into her talents and as such, whatever she attempts, she generally does very well. This book was the outcome of a lot of grief and self-reflection. This is a deeply personal account of what happened to her when life suddenly fell apart.
Mok was living a very successful life by many measures - she was a good project manager, had a devoted husband, birthed two highly intelligent children, and was seemingly making it all work. Then out of the blue, during a perfectly ordinary day, she has sudden and total hearing loss, accompanied by debilitating vertigo and several other secondary and tertiary related issues. To someone who is used to succeeding at most anything, I imagine she might've looked at this as one more mountain to climb and tame. That's kind of what happened, but not quite how she probably imagined. The rest of the book describes her inner turmoil, the impacts on her family, the implicit biases she has to navigate of having an invisible disability, and the medical experiences that were probably almost as traumatic and tragic as her diagnosis and prognosis.
As I said, the book was written well, but I had some concerns about the story itself. I want tread carefully here because I want to avoid minimizing neither what the author experienced nor the depth of her resilience. After all, the book is as much about both her tragedy and her personal growth, of which, there are plenty of both. In fact, if it were to have happened to me, I'm sure I would've been far more accepting and would've settled into my new reality without much fight - that's who I am - I go with the flow and I do whatever I can to avoid conflict - even with myself. So while I commend Mok for her strength and her accomplishments (with the new disability and in writing this book), there were a few things I think are worth discussing in reflection of what's been written:
1. I was a little confused about whether or not she actually sought out psychotherapy. At one point in the book, I thought she was leading to that. She was talking about how she realized that maybe she'd been in denial about being in denial. This was after finally hearing several people suggest therapy. But she never says whether she actually goes through with it. Rather, she talks about several coping strategies she deployed and references several books she found especially helpful. Now, I'm all for reading and researching. And I appreciated the detailed ways she described her coping strategies. I'm sure there are readers out there who would want to try some of them, including myself.
My concern is, however, that there felt like an implied ableism was also at work here. I might be 100% off base, and if I am, I apologize for my incorrect presumptions. Therapy is not for everyone, certainly, but for something that so dramatically changes a person's life, I'd hope that other people would consider giving it a try. I would hate for someone to read this book and not try it because one person, whom the reader will probably never meet or get to know outside of this book, thinks that if Mok was able to get past her grief and trauma, then they can too. Maybe is the answer. Maybe they can, but maybe they can't. If they find that they can't. I sincerely hope they might actually surrender and give therapy a try. There is no stigma for going, and it is rare to hit it off with the right therapist right away. Sometimes it takes trying several or even many. And if even if the reader is part of a society or a community where therapy is taboo, no one needs to know about the therapy - it is private. It can also be lifesaving. For this reason, I wish the author had come out and said whether or not therapy was engaged. I acknowledge that it's a private matter for her too, but given how open she was about everything else, it felt odd that she would've omitted it if she'd pursued it. Again, I apologize to Nin Mok if I've misinterpreted, and I also acknowledge that in the end, it's none of my business whether she did or did not. It's more that I wish she might've talked about therapy more encouragingly or would've never mentioned it in the first place.
2. There seems to be a belief that your fortune can be carried by directional momentum. At one point, Mok lists all the ways in which her life had a very forward momentum that allowed her to achieve (even overachieve) and check all the boxes of what might define a good life. Then she talks about how the winds changed to shift that momentum downwardly, and she itemizes all the various health issues that she was afflicted with (much of which sounded quite serious!), culminating in her hearing loss. She then decides it's time for the winds to change again, and she starts to make choices to influence that direction.
I'm not sure I'm fully bought into this theory. I believe we can make choices to direct the sails, yes, but I don't believe that we can control our fortunes and misfortunes. At one point in my life, I was a suicide counselor, and I listened to countless people who were in despair. Many of their stories included a sudden shift in their life trajectories (terminal illnesses, sudden onset mental health crises (e.g., an unexpected bipolar diagnosis), death of a life partner or child, loss of identity (especially those who were in executive positions who lost their jobs without warning), homelessness, bankruptcies, abandonment/unexplained estrangements, etc.). Maybe they should've/could've seen the signs that led to ground falling out from underneath their feet unexpectedly. But how they got where they got wasn't their fault. Sure, there might've been some degree of responsibility in some cases, but when something like these things happen, no amount of root cause analysis paralysis is helpful. Neither is the notion that they can control the outcomes of all their future decisions.
I don't think the author is actually implying that we are responsible for "bad" things happening to us. I think her point is that we can make choices to help us move out of whatever state we might be stuck in, be it depression, grief, confusion, etc. I think she may be telling us that by these choices, we can also reframe our narratives so that we can look upon our personal calamities, draw out the beauty offered to us through them, and find new identities, new passions, renewed relationships, and greater inner strengths, which we can leverage into new lives. But the way it's written, I think some of this may get lost in the message (at least in chapters 14 and 17).
3. At one point, she says that all grief is equal: No one's trauma is greater than that of another because the grief being felt is equal. The only difference is the story. Everyone's trauma journey is as individual as their fingerprints. Everyone has their cross to bear, and it is important to be kind.
I agree with all that, except I really don't know that all grief felt is equal. I am unconvinced of this, and I would need more evidence as to why she thinks so. I had a very defensive emotional reaction to reading this. So I think there's something here I need to pick at for myself to reveal why and then to deal with it. But if that's how I reacted to it, I think it might also be triggering for others too. I'm certain that is not what Mok intended, but I also am not sure what she meant.
4. Mok talks briefly about the individual needs of her children. Jet is described as possibly having ADHD, though it's never called that (I think she calls it hyperactivity with trouble focusing), and her daughter has severe respiratory issues related to asthma and something called breath holding seizures.
Her daughter's condition sounds very scary. I think I would be holding my own fearful breaths anytime she had an episode. Each instance described in the book sounds like it could've been fatal, and this is how I know I lack the fortitude to be a mother, especially given how cold the medical community seems to be where they live. I'm an awesome aunt and fairy godmother, but I was so relieved that I chose not to have children in reading about what they have to go through each time she contracts a cold. I want to wish her all the health in the world for the rest of her life.
Her son, if he has ADHD, sounds like his new school is better equipped to work with him than the private school they were previously at. I'm perturbed on his behalf and all the other kids in Australia whose teachers may have been equally or more dismissive than his had been. They are teachers and not experts in neurodivergence. To pressure him and his parents into labeling him as autistic, even after experts tested him, is lazy and selfish on their parts. Yup, I, who will never know how hard these teachers work or what else is going on in their lives or anything about Australia, yup, I am going to make this very terrible judgmental statement, and I'm not going to apologize for this one. Autism and ADHD, while often related, are two very different conditions, and they need very specific approaches. This part of the book made me very angry for their son, and it again made me glad not to be a parent.
Between the lack of sensitivity demonstrated by the medical professionals toward Mok and her daughter and the lazy selfishness of their son's teachers, I was pretty aghast. It completely challenged all the ways I thought about Australia until now. I've only encountered Australia secondhand - through reading, through social media, through film, and through stories from friends and family who have visited. I hope to visit myself someday. But I also hope never to have to deal with a medical issue while there. They sound really mean! I'm sure there are plenty of very nice and perfectly compassionate professionals there too, but my goodness, the ones Mok's family has had to work with sound really awful. I'm sorry they had to go through that over and over again.
4. When Mok talks about her reflection on her life up to the point where she decided to write this book, it feels like she's chastising herself a bit for the way she had previously prioritized her life. I thought she was being a little hard on herself. It also made me wonder if her husband would've had the same epiphanies if this had happened to him and he was the one who had to give up his career. It sounds like she's now reconciled with her decisions and is at peace with where she's at and how she got there. I'm glad for her. I think that's a critical part of how she approaches the rest of her life.
In the end, I'm happy for Mok - happy that they have found new life after an ordeal that could've completely bankrupted their souls if they'd let it, happy that they didn't let it happen that way, happy that they are all finding deeper depths in their relationships with each other. The author reached out to me on Goodreads and asked if I'd review her book. I'm feeling very honored to have been asked. I feel like I was invited into a very intimate soul search. Thank you so much Nin Mok!
PS, I love that she tried cupping. Made me remember how much my dad loved to help people through cupping. He also had hearing decline, though for him, it was a matter of aging and also a result of mini strokes. He had me cup him as well to try to bring more blood flow and unblock his qi. So reading that she went through cupping and acupuncture (my dad was in the process of getting a master's degree in acupuncture science when he was killed) brought back some cherished memories of my dad too. I thank her for this as well.
Mok was living a very successful life by many measures - she was a good project manager, had a devoted husband, birthed two highly intelligent children, and was seemingly making it all work. Then out of the blue, during a perfectly ordinary day, she has sudden and total hearing loss, accompanied by debilitating vertigo and several other secondary and tertiary related issues. To someone who is used to succeeding at most anything, I imagine she might've looked at this as one more mountain to climb and tame. That's kind of what happened, but not quite how she probably imagined. The rest of the book describes her inner turmoil, the impacts on her family, the implicit biases she has to navigate of having an invisible disability, and the medical experiences that were probably almost as traumatic and tragic as her diagnosis and prognosis.
As I said, the book was written well, but I had some concerns about the story itself. I want tread carefully here because I want to avoid minimizing neither what the author experienced nor the depth of her resilience. After all, the book is as much about both her tragedy and her personal growth, of which, there are plenty of both. In fact, if it were to have happened to me, I'm sure I would've been far more accepting and would've settled into my new reality without much fight - that's who I am - I go with the flow and I do whatever I can to avoid conflict - even with myself. So while I commend Mok for her strength and her accomplishments (with the new disability and in writing this book), there were a few things I think are worth discussing in reflection of what's been written:
1. I was a little confused about whether or not she actually sought out psychotherapy. At one point in the book, I thought she was leading to that. She was talking about how she realized that maybe she'd been in denial about being in denial. This was after finally hearing several people suggest therapy. But she never says whether she actually goes through with it. Rather, she talks about several coping strategies she deployed and references several books she found especially helpful. Now, I'm all for reading and researching. And I appreciated the detailed ways she described her coping strategies. I'm sure there are readers out there who would want to try some of them, including myself.
My concern is, however, that there felt like an implied ableism was also at work here. I might be 100% off base, and if I am, I apologize for my incorrect presumptions. Therapy is not for everyone, certainly, but for something that so dramatically changes a person's life, I'd hope that other people would consider giving it a try. I would hate for someone to read this book and not try it because one person, whom the reader will probably never meet or get to know outside of this book, thinks that if Mok was able to get past her grief and trauma, then they can too. Maybe is the answer. Maybe they can, but maybe they can't. If they find that they can't. I sincerely hope they might actually surrender and give therapy a try. There is no stigma for going, and it is rare to hit it off with the right therapist right away. Sometimes it takes trying several or even many. And if even if the reader is part of a society or a community where therapy is taboo, no one needs to know about the therapy - it is private. It can also be lifesaving. For this reason, I wish the author had come out and said whether or not therapy was engaged. I acknowledge that it's a private matter for her too, but given how open she was about everything else, it felt odd that she would've omitted it if she'd pursued it. Again, I apologize to Nin Mok if I've misinterpreted, and I also acknowledge that in the end, it's none of my business whether she did or did not. It's more that I wish she might've talked about therapy more encouragingly or would've never mentioned it in the first place.
2. There seems to be a belief that your fortune can be carried by directional momentum. At one point, Mok lists all the ways in which her life had a very forward momentum that allowed her to achieve (even overachieve) and check all the boxes of what might define a good life. Then she talks about how the winds changed to shift that momentum downwardly, and she itemizes all the various health issues that she was afflicted with (much of which sounded quite serious!), culminating in her hearing loss. She then decides it's time for the winds to change again, and she starts to make choices to influence that direction.
I'm not sure I'm fully bought into this theory. I believe we can make choices to direct the sails, yes, but I don't believe that we can control our fortunes and misfortunes. At one point in my life, I was a suicide counselor, and I listened to countless people who were in despair. Many of their stories included a sudden shift in their life trajectories (terminal illnesses, sudden onset mental health crises (e.g., an unexpected bipolar diagnosis), death of a life partner or child, loss of identity (especially those who were in executive positions who lost their jobs without warning), homelessness, bankruptcies, abandonment/unexplained estrangements, etc.). Maybe they should've/could've seen the signs that led to ground falling out from underneath their feet unexpectedly. But how they got where they got wasn't their fault. Sure, there might've been some degree of responsibility in some cases, but when something like these things happen, no amount of root cause analysis paralysis is helpful. Neither is the notion that they can control the outcomes of all their future decisions.
I don't think the author is actually implying that we are responsible for "bad" things happening to us. I think her point is that we can make choices to help us move out of whatever state we might be stuck in, be it depression, grief, confusion, etc. I think she may be telling us that by these choices, we can also reframe our narratives so that we can look upon our personal calamities, draw out the beauty offered to us through them, and find new identities, new passions, renewed relationships, and greater inner strengths, which we can leverage into new lives. But the way it's written, I think some of this may get lost in the message (at least in chapters 14 and 17).
3. At one point, she says that all grief is equal: No one's trauma is greater than that of another because the grief being felt is equal. The only difference is the story. Everyone's trauma journey is as individual as their fingerprints. Everyone has their cross to bear, and it is important to be kind.
I agree with all that, except I really don't know that all grief felt is equal. I am unconvinced of this, and I would need more evidence as to why she thinks so. I had a very defensive emotional reaction to reading this. So I think there's something here I need to pick at for myself to reveal why and then to deal with it. But if that's how I reacted to it, I think it might also be triggering for others too. I'm certain that is not what Mok intended, but I also am not sure what she meant.
4. Mok talks briefly about the individual needs of her children. Jet is described as possibly having ADHD, though it's never called that (I think she calls it hyperactivity with trouble focusing), and her daughter has severe respiratory issues related to asthma and something called breath holding seizures.
Her daughter's condition sounds very scary. I think I would be holding my own fearful breaths anytime she had an episode. Each instance described in the book sounds like it could've been fatal, and this is how I know I lack the fortitude to be a mother, especially given how cold the medical community seems to be where they live. I'm an awesome aunt and fairy godmother, but I was so relieved that I chose not to have children in reading about what they have to go through each time she contracts a cold. I want to wish her all the health in the world for the rest of her life.
Her son, if he has ADHD, sounds like his new school is better equipped to work with him than the private school they were previously at. I'm perturbed on his behalf and all the other kids in Australia whose teachers may have been equally or more dismissive than his had been. They are teachers and not experts in neurodivergence. To pressure him and his parents into labeling him as autistic, even after experts tested him, is lazy and selfish on their parts. Yup, I, who will never know how hard these teachers work or what else is going on in their lives or anything about Australia, yup, I am going to make this very terrible judgmental statement, and I'm not going to apologize for this one. Autism and ADHD, while often related, are two very different conditions, and they need very specific approaches. This part of the book made me very angry for their son, and it again made me glad not to be a parent.
Between the lack of sensitivity demonstrated by the medical professionals toward Mok and her daughter and the lazy selfishness of their son's teachers, I was pretty aghast. It completely challenged all the ways I thought about Australia until now. I've only encountered Australia secondhand - through reading, through social media, through film, and through stories from friends and family who have visited. I hope to visit myself someday. But I also hope never to have to deal with a medical issue while there. They sound really mean! I'm sure there are plenty of very nice and perfectly compassionate professionals there too, but my goodness, the ones Mok's family has had to work with sound really awful. I'm sorry they had to go through that over and over again.
4. When Mok talks about her reflection on her life up to the point where she decided to write this book, it feels like she's chastising herself a bit for the way she had previously prioritized her life. I thought she was being a little hard on herself. It also made me wonder if her husband would've had the same epiphanies if this had happened to him and he was the one who had to give up his career. It sounds like she's now reconciled with her decisions and is at peace with where she's at and how she got there. I'm glad for her. I think that's a critical part of how she approaches the rest of her life.
In the end, I'm happy for Mok - happy that they have found new life after an ordeal that could've completely bankrupted their souls if they'd let it, happy that they didn't let it happen that way, happy that they are all finding deeper depths in their relationships with each other. The author reached out to me on Goodreads and asked if I'd review her book. I'm feeling very honored to have been asked. I feel like I was invited into a very intimate soul search. Thank you so much Nin Mok!
PS, I love that she tried cupping. Made me remember how much my dad loved to help people through cupping. He also had hearing decline, though for him, it was a matter of aging and also a result of mini strokes. He had me cup him as well to try to bring more blood flow and unblock his qi. So reading that she went through cupping and acupuncture (my dad was in the process of getting a master's degree in acupuncture science when he was killed) brought back some cherished memories of my dad too. I thank her for this as well.