Good morning!
I’m so grateful to be waking up with you this morning. Enjoying a coffee together, or taking a walk together, or deciding to hit snooze and maybe coming back to this later.
Thank you for typing your email in that box and joining me here. This is the first of many newsletters. I hope to share a little piece of myself and my life in each one. And going forward I’ll share some of my favorite things with you— a book review here or there, and the occasional photo of a cat from my walks. I probably won’t always share such a comprehensive list of podcast episodes, so bookmark this one and remember it when you’re looking for something to listen to! :)
xo,
Leiah
~*Podcasts: Radio Stories
There was a common thread in every paper about every book I read in college: some sort of commentary on the human condition. I found it funny then, and I find it funny now. But the premise is true. Everyone has a story, and when you read or listen to someone’s story, you can learn something about yourself. We’re all connected in our similarities, even though we’re different. A reminder that even if we feel alone, we’re not.
The first app I ever paid for was the This American Life app. A friend thought I’d like the radio show, and I quickly fell in love with it and dug into the archives. The app isn’t around anymore, so you’ll have to dig into the archives on their website. But I went through some of the lists of recommendations -along with the archive itself- and picked out some of my favorites! I’ve listened to these more than once, either by choice, or because they rereleased the episode and I still wanted to listen to it.
There’s an episode for everything, a story for everyone. It’s the podcast that will always mean the most to me. The first one to keep me company when I needed it most.
I’ll warn you that most episodes of This American Life make me cry for one reason or another. But the linked page for each episode does a pretty good job at explaining what the show is about so you can skip around easily if you need to.
I copied the short episode description and linked each episode below.
I hope you enjoy them as much as I do! :)
~*This American Life: Favorite Episodes
In these dark, combative times, we attempt the most radical counterprogramming we could imagine: a show made up entirely of stories about delight.
The Problem We All Live With
All sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids. But there's one thing nobody tries anymore, despite lots of evidence that it works: desegregation. Nikole Hannah-Jones and Chana Joffe-Walt’s stories won a Peabody and a Polk Award.
There’s a program that brings together kids from two schools. One school is public and in the country’s poorest congressional district. The other is private and costs $43,000/year. They are three miles apart. The hope is that kids connect, but some of the public school kids just can’t get over the divide. We hear what happens when you get to see the other side and it looks a lot better.
Three people grapple with the question, “Are we alone?”
Stories of kids using perfectly logical arguments, and arriving at perfectly wrong conclusions.
People starting over—sometimes because they want to, other times because they have to.
This week we go into the room at the headquarters of fast food chain Hardee's with the people who decided that this burger with beef, hot dogs, and chips is what America should be eating. We'll hear the story of how they sold that burger and other instances where how you tell the story is more important than the literal facts.
For Thanksgiving weekend, stories about food, and people who set out on very particular missions with food.
This week we have stories of people going to very extreme measures to demonstrate their feelings. Elna Baker makes a questionable trip to Africa, while a man in Florida commits a series of disturbing acts in the name of love. Ira also goes to a high school to talk to kids before a dance.
We spend a month at a Jeep dealership on Long Island as they try to make their monthly sales goal: 129 cars. If they make it, they'll get a huge bonus from the manufacturer, possibly as high as $85,000 — enough to put them in the black for the month. If they don't make it, it'll be the second month in a row. So they pull out all the stops.
We document one day in a Chicago diner called the Golden Apple, starting at 5 a.m. and going until 5 a.m. the next morning. We hear from the waitress who has worked the graveyard shift for over two decades, the regular customers who come every day, the couples working out their problems, assorted drunks, and, of course, cops.
A security guard at the airport notices something going wrong on the tarmac, and takes it upon herself to fix it. It’s way harder than she expects.
A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: How it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn't learn the lessons—until it was too late.
Stories of very small injustices and also one very big one.
Can love be taught? A family uses a controversial therapy to train their son to love them. And other stories about the hard and sometimes painful work of loving other people.
It’ll Make Sense When You’re Older
At first, it’s super annoying, getting told it’ll make sense when you’re older. Then, when you’re a teenager, hard lessons are learned, despite your best efforts to be too cool to care. By the time you’re actually old, you know a bunch of stuff— and you’re desperate to hold onto it. You might even wonder HOW you know all the things you know.
Most of us go from day to day just coasting on the status quo. If it ain’t broke, why fix it—right? But when routines just get too mundane or systems stop making sense, sometimes you just have to hold your breath and jump. People who leap from their lives, their comfort zones, even through time.
Most of the time, the updates we share about our lives are small and inconsequential. This week, status updates that interrupt daily life. We hear two friends talk about how one of them has become rich and famous. And an entire town gets a status update on itself.
If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS
It’s safe to say whatever you want on the Internet; nobody will know it’s you. But that same anonymity makes it possible for people to say all the awful things that make the Internet such an annoying and sometimes frightening place. This week: what happens when the Internet turns on you?
Stories about mysteries that exist in relationships we thought couldn't possibly surprise us, the strangeness of putting our wants on the line with someone who may not share them at all, and how much we're willing to risk for someone we may never see again.
We head to some of the happiest places on earth: amusement parks! Ira Glass takes us behind the scenes at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City, where the young staff – coached by a funny, fun-loving boss just a little older than they are – truly seem to love their jobs.
Stories from people who need a grown-up. Featuring teenage girls asking for advice about their love lives and Ira's tribute to his very grown-up friend Mary.
Stories of the kindness of strangers and where it leads. Also, the unkindness of strangers and where that can lead. All of today's stories take place in the city most people think of as the least kind city in America: New York.
Summer is a time when change seems more possible than ever. But is that really how it happens? Can people actually reinvent themselves in the warmer months? This week we present stories — and some comedy — about people and their summer selves.
Love makes us do crazy things. But usually not this crazy. This week for Valentine's Day we have stories of people going to extremes to find and pursue their one true love.
Stories of people who tell a lie and then believe the lie more than anyone else does. In other words: Stories about people pulling hoaxes...on themselves.
~*I didn’t share many recent episodes, but I think most of them are amazing! You can find the recent episodes anywhere you listen to podcasts, and you can find every episode here.
~*Therapy thing: Little Steps
I started going to therapy in June. But it took me a long time to get there. The first time I went to therapy was when I was a kid. We went to a family therapy session. I remember feeling pressure to do it well, whatever that meant. When the person asked what we could do better as a family, I couldn’t think of anything so I made something up. I said we needed to tell each other that we love each other more. This is not something I thought we needed to do. If anything, it’s something I think we’ve all been really good at for as long as I can remember. I think I made my mom cry when I said that.
Mental health wasn’t really a thing when we were kids. We didn’t talk much about how we felt. We swept things under the rug, and when we had big feelings we were usually being dramatic or too sensitive. But mental health was always in the background. Lingering. That pressure to do well was there. And so was that nervous feeling of not wanting to fail or let anyone down. I didn’t want to say the wrong thing or not give something my all.
A few years ago I read “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone” and I related to so many things in the book that it gave me a new idea of what it meant to go to therapy. It also talked about all the little steps you take before you feel ready to do anything. Reading that book was a little step.
One day my parents got a call that my brother was in the hospital. He had a panic attack and ended up in the emergency room. (Panic attacks can look and feel a lot like heart attacks.) He’s tall and he didn’t really fit in the hospital bed. He didn’t belong there. And when I saw him I couldn’t hold back tears. We aren’t that close, but we’ve always held space for each other. He started talking to me about his anxiety and I felt I could relate to him even though I hadn’t experienced it in the same way. I told him about what helped me and before I knew it I said therapy would help. He asked me if I had gone and I said no.
I couldn’t get that out of my head. That moment when a yes could’ve helped change his mind about getting help. I’m doing it, it’s helping me, it could help you.
I still didn’t go until a while after that. I still haven’t shared with him that I’m going and it’s helping me. I still feel a bit like I failed him in that moment when I couldn’t say I was going. My first couple months of therapy, we talked about him a lot. About my relationship with him and my boundaries. About how I could get him to go to therapy. I realized I couldn’t. Because there are all these little steps we all have to take.
It’s only been 8 months since I started going to therapy. I haven’t “fixed” everything. And I haven’t told my brother. But when there’s an opening, I hope me telling him that I’m going, and that it’s helping, can be a little step for him, the way that suggesting going was a little step for me.
P.S. you can buy the mug in the photo here!