Before my teen years, I was losing my hearing pretty quickly, and I was getting very, very angry. I was beginning to become an angry person because of that.

Evelyn Glennie, the Scottish percussionist who became profoundly deaf, has often described the emotional impact of losing her hearing in childhood. In recounting her early adolescence—when her hearing loss accelerated—she has spoken about feeling isolated and frustrated, and about anger becoming a dominant response as communication and everyday experiences grew harder. This reflection typically appears in interviews and talks where she narrates the turning point that led her to reframe “hearing” as a whole-body, tactile form of listening and to pursue music seriously despite disability. The quote captures the pre-breakthrough period, before she developed coping strategies and confidence in her musical path.

Glennie’s statement emphasizes that disability is not only a physical condition but also an emotional and social experience. The rapid loss of hearing during formative years can produce grief, fear, and a sense of injustice, which she names plainly as anger. By acknowledging this, she resists the sanitized “inspirational” narrative often imposed on disabled achievers and instead highlights the psychological cost of sudden limitation and misunderstanding by others. The quote also implies a later transformation: anger is presented as a stage—an understandable reaction that precedes adaptation, self-advocacy, and the discovery of new ways to perceive and participate in the world.