Daily Inspiration Quote by Marion Ross

There is a quiet brutality in the word constantly. Marion Ross isn’t describing a single awkward moment; she’s naming the exhausting, repetitive labor of recalibrating how you treat someone when the usual cues fail. Coming from an actor - a professional reader of faces, timing, and tone - the line lands with extra sting. Performance depends on rhythm. Hearing loss breaks rhythm. So she has to rehearse empathy the way she’d rehearse a scene: again and again, on purpose.

The specific intent is practical, almost confessional: she’s admitting that her default setting is to forget. That honesty matters because it refuses the comforting fiction that care is automatic. The subtext is more complicated. “Remind myself” implies she’s aware of how quickly irritation or impatience can creep in when communication doesn’t go smoothly. It’s a preemptive check on that impulse, an attempt to protect the other person from being treated like an inconvenience.

Contextually, the quote sits in a culture that still treats hearing loss as either a punchline (the “say that again?” gag) or a private decline to be managed offstage. Ross drags it into the open and frames it as a relational issue, not merely a medical one. It’s also a tell about power: the hearing person controls the pace, the volume, the willingness to repeat. Her “constant” reminder is an ethics of attention - a small daily choice to slow down, face someone, and communicate as if they’re fully in the room, because they are.